











^ -nt 




^ V 












■ 















■ ° « 



-*>, 












^ «- 

























































































•v 






















> 



^ ^> 






. 









FORGIVENESS AND LAW, 



GKOUKDED IK" PEIKCIPLES 



INT ERPRETED 



BY HUMAN ANALOGIES 



BY 

HORACE BUSHNELL. 



NEW YORK: ,' : 
A - 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

1874. 



febff 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 18*74, by 

HORACE BUSH NELL, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, 

at "Washington. 




John F. Trow & Son, 

Printers and Book bin hers, 

205-213 East \-ztk St., 

NEW YORK. 



ADYEETISEMESTT. 



Proposing a discontinuance of the last half — Parts 
III and IV — of my former treatise entitled Tlie Vica- 
rious Sacrifice, this present volume is put forth to occupy 
the place made vacant. The design is, at some future 
time, to put the former first half and this new last 
half together, and recompose the treatise, in a form 
to more satisfactorily represent what I would like to 
say of the whole subject. What I have taken to be 
" the whole subject " comprehends more, it will be 
remembered, than what is included topically in our 
theology under the head of atonement ; viz., another, 
not less weighty part, relating to Christ as a power on 
character. This other part, as set forth in the first 
half of my former treatise, I retain. But the latter 
half, discontinued and now to be supplied, go vers 
exactly all that has been heretofore and commonly 
taken as being the Atonement. So that we are 
having on our hands in the discussion just what has 
been, and to the vast majority of disciples still is, the 



IV ADVERTISEMENT. 

whole topic. It is not so to me, but a good deal 
less. And yet it is of the greater consequence, 
that it has so nearly gotten a monopoly of right in 
the field. Besides it may justly be more dear to 
us all, that so many of the best and holiest believers 
of the past ages have found their life centered in it ; 
faultily and even repulsively conceived as it certainly 
has been. And if it has so great possible value when 
tainted by so great mistake, how much more is it to 
be valued if it can be rightly understood. 

H. B. 



CO^TEl^TS 



INTRODUCTION. 



In what way led to this revision, Page 10. The moral view of atone- 
ment asserted even more completely, 12. Novelty excused, 14. 
How all doctrines have to pass a change of form when they come 
into the human molds of thought, 16. Reasons why this doctrine of 
Christ requires revision, 21. Brief notice of Dr. Campbell's 

treatise, 28. 

Page. 

CHAPTER I. — Forgiveness and propitiation, without expiation. 33 

The one principle that underlies the subject, 34. 

I. 

Forgiveness by GTod and by men coincide in the New Testament, one 
set forth by the other, 35. Negative forgivenesses, 36. Difficulties 
that are real, 37. How forgivenesses fail, 39. Two tilings necessary, 
sympathy with and cost made for the subject, 40-41. Examples 
for illustration, 42, 45, 46. "We require in forgiveness to be our- 
selves propitiated, 48. In this we have the tragic element of our 
virtue, 49. 

II. 

The analogy of our own propitiations, 50. Applied to God, 52. Not 
that Christ dies for the reaction of it, 53. God loves his adversary 
already, 54. God's holiness not too inflexible, 55. God's, office in 
government no objection, 56. Our analogies only show that we 
propitiate ourselves, 51. No implication dishonorable to God, 59. 
God's propitiation above time, 60. 

III. 

Scripture statement of propitiation, 63. Usus loquendi of the altar 
word, 64. Old Testament sacrifices, 66. Statute concerning blood, 
68. How these old forms are related to Christ's sacrifice, 11. The 
Propitiation thus set forth, 72. 

1* 



VI CONTENTS. 

Paga 

IV. 

Objection to all propitiations however conceived, 73. Propitiations 

from eternity, 74. Another solution, 76. Not supposed that God 

has reluctances here to overcome, 77. An ideal of God that must 

have great value, 78. 

V. — (without expiation.) 
"What now to be thought of expiation, 81. Classic word not in the 
Scriptures, 82. Worst and best examples, 82. Suffering, right or 
wrong, the main thing in expiation, 83. Demoralizing effect of ex- 
piation, 85. It is evil paid, for evil due, 86. No instance in Scrip- 
ture, 87. And no indications for it, 87. No interest of character 
in expiation, 90. 

CHAPTER II. — Law and commandment 93 

The satisfaction of law, 94=. Theologic devices for this purposes, 95. 

I. 

Christ and his commandments, 97. Who is he to assume such a right, 98. 
General statement, 99. Two words, Law and Commandment, 100. 
What Law is, 101. What Commandment, 103. Commandment in 
a sense unlegal, 104. Liberty in these, 105. Christ's own exposi- 
tion of them, 106. Offices and uses, 107. Law first stage of dis- 
cussion, 108. No perfect institute in itself, 109. Mostly negative, 
109. Has no inspirations for duty, 110. Commandment includes 
more and better, 111, 112. Leave the tabulated rule and embrace 
the divine person for law, 113. Commandment offered to faith, 114. 
How the two are related, 115. One a factor in nature, the other in 
the supernatural, 117. Law never to be taken away by redemp- 
tion, 118. 

II. 

Great Analogies also to be noted, 120. Mother and child, 121. The 
school, 123. Labor and the curse, 124. The army discipline, 125. 
The civil state, 127. The two factor method in all these analogies, 
130. No compensations here in deliverance from the law, 131. It 
never works destructively, 132. 

III. 

The gospel a twofold way of discipline in like manner, 133. General 
Proposition to include all, 134. The penally coercive discipline, 134. 
No judicial penalty here, 136. The two factors work together, not 
one against the other, 137. No justice comes till after the discipline 
is through, 139. But we are kept in due impression of its future, 



' »jjhu" ' T »-*+-* —J mut i i 



CONTENTS. Vll 

Page. 
140. Apprehended loss of justice, 141. No thought of saying 
justice by penal compensations, 143. Public and Retributive justice, 
145. Christ incarnated into the discipline, 147. His incarnation is 
the necessity of suffering accepted, 149. More to him than to us, for 
■we do not much realize our own, 151. See no law of desert and 
therefore make light of it, 152. Make no sufficient account of the 
suffering of the good, 153. Christ's suffering great because of his 
purity, 154. Also by his great amount of mind, 155. Suffers in a 
failing cause, 157. The temptation, 158. Weeping over the city and 
the agony, 159. No justice in the suffering of the cross, 161. 
IY. 
Some of the texts supposed to show God's dealing with Christ on the 
score of justice, 162. How we make proof texts, 163. No literal 
language for religious ideas, 163. Gratitude exaggerates always, 
164. Christ made a curse, 166. Bare our sins, 167. Gives himself 
a ransom, 168. The scape-goat forms, 168. Forms of fifty-third of 
Isaiah, 169. How the commandment keeps the law, gives it back its 
honor, and works conjunctively with it, 173-6. 

CHAPTER III. — Justification by faith 177 

Rom. iii, 25-6, How understood, 177. Two sets of words in English to 
represent one in the Greek, 178. Probably no relief, and can only 
take our disadvantage as it is, 181. Legal justification impossible, 
183. Legal justification implies justification before faith, 184. The 
fiction supposed, 185. Also another fiction, 186. Legal satisfaction 
an ignoble gift for character, 187. Highest of all words for character 
is right or righteousness. 190. 

I. 

Plato and Socrates in quest of its secret power, 192. Psychological 
non-discovery, 193. -Abraham in advance of Socrates, 194. God 
early declared to be source of all righteousness in men, 196. Christ 
puts us to the seeking after righteousness — even that of God, 197. 
How Christ advances the scope o'f the idea, 199. Legal justification 
cold and insufficient, 201. True justification the normal state of all 
created mind, 202. Faith how related to justification, 204. What 
the true faith is, 205. Luther's great discovery true, 206. Only his 
head mistook the meaning of his heart, 207. Justification and sanc- 
tification not confounded, 210. 



V1U CONTENTS. 

Page 
II. 

How related to imputation, 212. We are also to have our righteousness 
putatively in God. 

CHAPTER IV. — Threefold doctrine of Christ concerning him- 
self 218 

How often has it been wished that Christ had given us a doctrine con- 
cerning himself, 218. He has done it, 218-19. His three Articles, 
219. Our English word Comforter a great mistake, 220. Dispenses 
comfort, of course, much as Christ himself does, 222. We have 
missed the meaning here by not observing that the Spirit is to work 
in and by Christ's work, 224. 

ARTICLE I. 

Of sin because they believe not on me, 225. New sensibility of sin 
expected, 225. Defect of the old methods, 221. They did not produce 
the sense of sin as a state, 228. Christ reproves of sin by the sense 
of what is not done, 229. 

ARTICLE II. 

Of righteousness, because I go to the Father and ye see me no more, 230. 
Great and upright characters commonly not valued till they die, 231. 
Christ expects a great revision to occur after he is gone, 233. By 
what he calls righteousness he means justification, 234. And there 
is no legal justification possible to bethought of here, 235. 

ARTICLE III. 

Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged, 236. Conceives 
evil to be a great organizer, 237. But the bad kingdom will be 
shaken by the trial scene at hand, 239. Judas, Peter, Annas, 
Caiaphas, all shaken, 240. Pilate himself is judged, 241. So dis- 
possessed that he makes court to Herod, 244. All the multitude dis- 
possessed by what they have seen, 247. All this by no display of 
force but only by goodness, 247. 

The uses proposed to be made of this doctrine of Christ, 249. Not to 
be a rival doctrine, 250. To be a duplicate view that will take us 
away from so many literalities, 252. In the three articles we have 
the full scope of a gospel, 253. They give conviction not by the 
law, 253. The justification is simple and clear without the word, 
255. 



. — < r « uygw [ : 



INTRODUCTION. 



It seems to be required of me, by the unexpected 
arrival of fresh light, that I should make a large revision 
of my former treatise, entitled The Vicarious Sacrifice, 
and especially of the Parts III. and IY. of the same. 
Having undertaken to find the truth on this great subject 
at whatever cost, I am not willing to be excused from 
farther obligation because the truth appears to, be out- 
growing my published expositions. My former discussion has 
been as favorably received as I had any right to expect, 
and there is no reason, personal to myself, why I should be 
fastened to my own small measures, when larger measures 
are given me. Besides, how shall a man ever get rid of his 
old sins, when he can not let go his little outgrown opinions ? 
Wishing no change, I have yet not ceased to consider and 
reconsider the whole question, as carefully as if I had not 
written, watching for all inward monitions and outward 
suggestions, whereby I might be corrected and guided 
farther in, to apprehend the matter of it more worthily, 
and in closer accord with the truth. 

Since it so often helps the interest and also the under 
standing of the reader to know in what manner the writer 
came into the arguments and opinions he is trying to set 
forth, I feel constrained to indulge a little harmless egotism. 



10 INTKODUCTION. 

Thus it lias happened to me twice over, when writing on 
two simply practical subjects, to be overtaken by surprise 
in suggestions setting me back on the last half of my book, 
and requiring amendments in it that amounted to a vir- 
tual substitution of it by new matter. I do not pretend 
to say that I have these amendments by any private revela- 
tion, I only know that I have them as being found by them, 
and not as having found them myself. Perhaps our new 
seeing in such matters is, at times, but our mood ; and yet 
perhaps our mood may be our gift of seeing. 

Thus, I was writing a discourse on the inquiry, How shall 
a man be able to entirely and perfectly forgive his enemy, 
so as to forever sweeten the bitterness of his wounded 
feeling and leave no sense of personal revulsion ? I can not 
give the whole argument here, but it must suffice to say, 
that I was brought squarely down upon the discovery, that 
nothing will ever accomplish the proposed real and true 
forgiveness, but to make cost in the endeavor, such cost as 
new tempers and liquefies the reluctant nature. And this 
making cost will be his propitiation of himself. Why not 
say this of all moral natures, why not of the Great Propitia- 
tion itself? Here opens my Chapter I., entitled Forgiveness 
and Propitiation. 

Before the complete writing out of this, I was overtaken 
again by corrective suggestion at another point. Falling on 
the injunction by which Christ lays it onus to "keep his 
commandments," the prosy dullness in which we commonly 
embalm his words, when we draw them out as tests and 
lessons of practice, was forever exploded by the question 
occurrent, Why his commandments ? Where is the law ? 
Does he undertake to overtop Sinai, and be a new standard 
of character ? Thus I had the Greek words nomos and entole, 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

before me, and they began to freshen each other in the in- 
dividualities of .their uses and meanings. One thought 
opened into another, and I began to sketch a series of 
articles for the press that should give a practically fresh 
exposition of the Saviour's word. Suffice it to say that I 
shortly came upon the discovery that the law-state has 
everywhere a commandment-state going with it, to be its 
consummation or crown ; its fulfillment, and so, in a 
very important and true sense, its satisfaction al substitute. 
Here then begins another, partly very simple, partly very 
subtle range of inquiry, treated of in Chapter II., called 
Law and Commandment. In this certain terms of our 
atonement language get a qualified permission, but nothing 
that offends the principles of right. 

These two chapters, I. and II., cover the general ground 
of my revision, as they also do the general field of what has 
been called in orthodox circles the atonement. My chapter 
IV. occupies a ground by itself. How it came it will not 
be difficult to see, only it may be difficult to find why it did 
not come sooner, and to some, at least, of the great inter- 
preters. It has to me the nature rather of an occurrence 
than of a discovery ; for how can that be called a discovery 
which the Master's words have been plainly teaching for 
eighteen hundred years, and which we, his disciples, have, 
by some unaccountable dullness, missed, even down to a 
particular day of accident within the last six months ? An 
oversight all the more humiliating that the doctrine we. have 
missed has been the doctrine of Christ by Christ himself; 
an operative doctrine indeed, and not a formulating, giving 
the outfit of the Spirit and the implemental forces by which 
lie is to work. And again, let it be the more valuable to us 
that it comes in after the formulating history is done, to be 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

a gospel by Christ's own authority, not inwoven with any 
of the old textures of the schools, but set in by an intercal- 
ation, to have its own footing, and its regulative sway in the 
respectful deference of the ages to come. 

It will be observed in these preliminaries that the cor- 
rections I am proposing to make do not include a return to 
any of the standard theologic formulas I have heretofore 
rejected. I recant no one of my denials. I only undertake 
to fill the vacant spaces made by them with better material. 
Thus, if any one should imagine that in now asserting the 
positive fact of a propitiation of God, I return to the com- 
mon orthodox position, that will depend entirely upon the 
manner in which the propitiation is believed to be made, 
whether as by a legal satisfaction for sin, or wholly one side 
of law by a transaction in and of the divine feeling itself. 
I asserted a propitiation before, but accounted for the word 
as one by which the disciple objectivizes his own feelings, 
conceiving that God himself is representatively mitigated or 
become propitious, because he is himself inwardly recon- 
ciled to God. Instead of this, I now assert a real propitia- 
tion of God, finding it in evidence from the propitiation we 
instinctively make ourselves, when we heartily forgive. 
So if it should be imagined that I now give in to the 
legal-substitution, legal-satisfaction theory, it will only be 
true that I assert a scheme of discipline for man, which is 
contrived to work its own settlement, in being; fulfilled and 
consummated by an obedience in the higher plane of liberty 
itself. 

I still assert the " moral view " of the atonement as 
before, and even more completely than before ; inasmuch as 
I propose to interpret all that is prepared and suffered in the 
propitiation of God and the justification of men, by a 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

reference to the moral pronouncements of human nature and 
society ; assuming that nothing can be true of God, or of 
Christ, which is not true in some sense more humano, and 
is not made intelligible by human analogies. We can not 
interpret God, as any one may see, except by what we find 
in our own personal instincts and ideas. And just here is 
the sin of all our theologic endeavor in the past ages, 
especially as regards this particular subject, that we invent 
so many ingredients that are verbals only, having no reality 
and no assignable meaning. We contrive a justice in God, 
which accepts the pains of innocence in place of the pains 
of wrong, and which is, in fact, the very essence of injustice. 
We contrive a forgiveness on the score of compensation, 
which to our human conceptions mocks the idea. We 
imagine that Christ has a virtue more transcendent than any 
of mortal kind, because it is optional ; whereas nothing is a 
virtue save as it is done for the right, and as being under 
moral obligation. We conceive that Christ is even over- 
good in this way, better than he need be, and that the sur- 
plus he gains is a meritum prepared for us; asserting how 
often that we are saved by the merits of Christ, when we 
can not so much as conceive the idea. We contrive how law 
may be satisfied for transgressors without their punishment, 
and then we teach that God may justly punish after satisfac- 
tion. Our precise difficulty is, in all such impossibles of 
thought, that we are trying to construct the ways of God, or of 
his Son, without any light from our own moral instincts and 
ideas ; to make him intelligible in the matter of a gospel, 
without intelligiblcs anywhere given to be his interpreters. 
We put the bits of glass and crockery into our kaleidescope, 
and tnrninsj it round and round we make theologic figures 

that we call truths, and which having no ideas in them, we 

2 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

think must surely stand, because they look so regular and 
are milled in the scientific way of the scientific instru- 
ment. Thus we go on from age to age, trying vainly to 
fasten theologic notions that represent God by nothing in 
ourselves. Is it not time now, after so many centuries gone 
by, to have it discovered, that there is no truth concerning 
God which is not somehow explicated by truths of our own 
moral consciousness ? 

If now these prefatory specifications signify less, taken 
by themselves, than might be desired, they will at least have 
a certain value in suggesting beforehand what I myself con- 
ceive to be the significance or intended amount of the 
reconstructions offered — that I do not undertake to be 
orthodox, but to be more sufficiently and scripturally true. 

It will be understood, I presume, that I suppose the two 
revised statements, or solutions of doctrine I am now going 
to propound, to be really new. I frankly allow that I do, 
and also as frankly confess that in this simple fact my 
courage and confidence are most weakened by misgivings. 
For who can expect a great subject like this, which has 
engaged so many of the most gigantic minds of so many 
past ages, to be now, in these last times, more sufficiently 
apprehended and better expounded by an ordinary teacher, 
at his common level of standing. It is difficult, I allow, not 
to be greatly appalled when confronted by this objection. 
But it must not be forgotten that now and then some person 
will be stronger in his accidents, than other and greater men 
have been in their powers; also that God himself sometimes 
makes accidents for mind by his own private touch, when 
he will unfold some needed lesson; also that God has a way 
of preparing times for the uncovering of truth, and that as 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

lie would not have his Son appear till the fullness of time 
should come, so he will not expect his Son's gospel to be 
duly conceived till the times are ready and all the suggestive 
conditions ripe that may set us in upon it. No greatest man 
or champion is going to conquer a truth before its time, and 
no least competent man, we may also dare to say, need miss 
of a truth when its time has come, and the flags of right 
suggestion are all out before him. How easy a thing it is, 
in fact, to think what the times have got ready to be thought, 
and are even whispering to us from behind all curtains of 
discovery, and out of all most secret nooks and chambers 
of experience. That now the clock has finally struck, and 
the day has fully come for some new and different thinking 
of this great subject, I most verily believe. And, to make 
this evident, I propose to occupy the few remaining pages 
of this preliminary chapter in showing by what signs the 
two staple matters of what has heretofore been called the 
Christian Atonement, viz., Propitiation and Legal Substitu- 
tion, appear to be asking, or rather expectantly waiting, 
for some more satisfactory, better grounded exposition. 

In the original word of Scripture the truths revealed 
are either visibly or verbally presented from that other 
side of heavenly announcement whence they come. 
There is no sympathy as yet, no twofold thinking in the 
forms, for they represent one party only. But the supposi- 
tion is, that being given to intelligence, intelligence will fall 
at work upon them, and that human thought, laboring in 
the outward images of things, will generate modes of speech 
and laws of experience that compose a kind of second 
language on the base-level of nature. And so it will, by 
and by, begin to be the problem how to get the simple 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

indicative matter of revelation into the forms of thought 
prepared in the thought-language of the mere understand- 
ing. The problem is, to accomplish a marriage of the two 
parties, and get the declarative work grafted in upon the 
natural analogies, when it will be so much closer to the 
common life of men, and settle its hold just so much more 
firmly on their convictions. We must not be so jealous 
of naturalism as to be alarmed by this process. It is not 
the supernatural submitting itself to nature to be buried and 
lost, but going down to hook itself in upon nature by 
seizing on the analogies of thought and law ; so to become 
fast locked in all the terms of experience and opinion which 
thought has generated. The bent w r e are thus receiving 
more and more distinctly towards nature and science is not 
wholly mischievous, as many appear to assume in their 
nervous dread of naturalism, but is our instinctive endeavor 
to obtain a new anchorage ground for christian truths and 
ideas, where they will hold us more firmly, and yield us a 
more settled confidence. To change the figure, we digest 
the declarative matter supernaturally given, and turn it into 
chyle for the absorbent action of our intelligence, in the 
plane of life where we grow our common thought and frame 
our common judgments. 

Thus our fathers, down to a few generations back, made 
up their account of human depravity under what they called 
" the covenant of works ; " and only could not be sure, 
whether the propagation of it was " by the federal headship 
established in that covenant," or <( by Adam sinning for us," 
or "by our own sinning in Adam," or by "God putting over 
Adam's sin upon us by an act of imputation." All which 
is substituted now, with how great advantage, by simply 
conceiving that every sinning man is retributively damaged 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

in his person by the effect of his sin, which damage is propa- 
gated of necessity in his posterity, by well known laws of 
physiology. 

In the same way all the expectances of christian nurture 
were set forth, and conceived to have their pledge in " the 
covenant of Abraham," and laborious argumentations were 
drawn out to show that the sacrament of baptism followed 
the sacrament of circumcision, connecting us back, as it 
were across the sea, with that far off, dimly beheld dispensa- 
tion of promise. Whereas now we behold a promise always 
at hand in the laws of physiology, rinding how, in their 
dispensation, every good element and gracious longing 
works reproductively in the child, to fashion, as by a law, 
the lineaments of a divine life established in its parent. 
And then, furthermore, after the child is born, we do not see 
it to be a wholly separate creature at first, but regard it for 
a long time still as being in the matrix of a parental culture, 
where it is wax to every temper, feeling, sentiment, all that 
bathes it in expression, all that is done for it and round it. 
And then to finish out our conception, instead of going back 
to Abraham, to imagine some blessing coming out of Abra- 
ham's faith, we say, without scruple, that we mean to have 
our child " grow up " in the faith. 

We get a similar advantage when we put ourselves to the 
question of Christ's divinity. Piling on scripture citations 
ought to sufficiently prove it. And yet after it is proved in 
this manner, it will scarcely seem to be true. There is, in 
fact, no way to make out his divinity, so effective and true as 
to put him down into humanity, under the laws of human- 
ity, and sec, from his childhood onward, whether he stays 
there. Starting him above the level of humanity, there to 

simply continue ' and be, embalmed in texts, makes him a 

2* 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

kind of riddle in his story — we can no way master it, and 
are sure of nothing concerning it — but when we find that we 
can not keep him under manhood after we have put him 
there, he will have proved his divinity by experiment. The 
Unitarians have been of great service to us here ; for when 
we start with them, at their point of born humanity, we find 
him shooting proudly up out of human range and level, in 
all the wonders of his great life and character, and by no 
fit name can we call him but Immanuel. The closer we 
bring him down to manhood the more evidently, visibly, 
indisputably superhuman, or divine he appears. 

In the same way again we have found our advantage in a 
less ghostly way of conceiving the supernatural. We tried 
a long time, and some are trying still, to think it as a phan- 
tasmagoric affair that is super as regards nature, and comes out 
apparition-wise in prodigies and flitting visitations, super- 
naturally disturbing our mortal affairs. Therefore believing, 
it may be, in supernaturals that occurred a long time ago, 
or clear back in the beginnings of revelation, we took up the 
impression that such . things were credible when they 
were far enough off; but that anything so irregular may 
be occurring now, we assumed to be wholly incredible. 
What then is nature, we have lately begun to ask, as related 
to the supernatural ? and what is the supernatural as related 
to nature? And one, we learn to say, is the world under 
causes, the other the world above causes. One is matter and 
force, the other is mind in the self-arbitrament of will. 
Whereupon it is discovered, strange to say, that we act 
supernaturally ourselves, and are in fact supernatural beings. 
All minds, in all orders and worlds, created and uncreated, 
make up thus a realm supernatural, under whose action 
nature is every where flexible as a hand for its uses. And 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

the supernatural is only just as much more real than nature 
as it is more sovereign, and more nearly universal. We get 
a place for it thus, where it shows itself as a factor in our 
common life, and as such is the subject of our consciousness. 
"We no longer perambulate the sky and climb over the moon 
to find it, but we have it as a fact familiar to our knowledge. 
Again, we get a solid footing in the same manner for the 
great gospel fact of vicarious sacrifice, by showing its cor- 
respondence and symbolic natural agreement with facts and 
demonstrations occurring all the while in our human rela- 
tions. All love, as we perceive, reveals the vicarious instinct, 
either natural or religious. The sad story of a child in the 
street, the moan of a wounded stranger by the roadside, 
engages it. The malefactor dying for his crime will none 
the less burden some good man's heart, but possibly the 
more, that he suffers only what he deserves. And so the 
mother, the friend, the patriot, are all specially charged with 
their own special burden of concern or sorrow. Half the 
wants that gird our industry, and half the cost we 
undergo in our feeling, are instigated by our vicarious re- 
lations and offices. And Christ is with us under like insti- 
gations, only immeasurably above us in the scope of his 
sympathies and the generally perfect fullness of his aims 
and dispositions. Nothing is easier to believe than that he, 
in this most humanly natural and worthy sense, bows himself 
to suffering in a mission of vicarious sacrifice. But if, taking 
hold of certain highly figurative phraseologies, we conceive 
them prosily enough to convert the matter of the vicarious 
suffering into penal endurances under the justice of God, 
we recoil from believing a story of supernatural good- 
ness so doubtfully good. Even if we say that we believe, 
our faith is choked by a jealousy of mistake, and we are 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

scarce able to hold ourselves to any but a very thin, misgiv- 
ing sort of confidence. 

Edwards drew what I look upon as the finest paragraph 
in all his works, setting forth Christ in the sentiment of Lis 
vicarious relation to men as their Redeemer aud Saviour. 
And yet he could not imagine that it amounted to very 
much more than a pleasant commendation of him to oiir 
human feeling. That it showed the very essence of the 
substitution — how " he bore our sins in his own body on the 
tree," how " God laid on him the iniquity of us all," and 
how " the chastisement of our peace was upon him " — he did 
not so much as imagine : that was something more literal, 
and not to be explained by any such mere human analogies. 
" Christ's great love," he says, " and pity to the elect was 
one source of his suffering — [one source only]. A strong- 
exercise of pity excites a lively idea of the misery under 
which he pities them, * * his love and pity fixed the idea 
of them in his mind as if he had really been they, and 
fixed their calamity in his mind as though it had been really 
his. A very strong and lively love and pity towards the 
miserable, tends to make their case ours ; as in other respects 
so in this, in particular, as it doth in our idea place us in 
their stead, under their misery, with a most lively feeling 
sense of that misery, as it were feeling it for them, actually 
suffering it in their stead by strong sympathy."* And yet 
he could not see the atonement here ; that was transacted 
on the nails and the wood ! As if the mere suffering of his 
human body were any thing in comparison with the great 
moral woe of his heart, or as if it were intended to be any 
thing but an outward sign of that. We see from his words 
that he had the key in his hand, but he did not dare to use 
* Miscellaneous observations. 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

it. Had he thus been able to see the matter of the sacrifice 
in the moral analogies so powerfully sketched by himself, 
instead of lapsing under the jargon of penalties endured 
and legal compensations paid to justice, what strength and 
clearness would he have added to all our christian ideas — 
giving us a gospel simple as our own human feeling, and 
faithfully interpreted and verified by it. 

It only remains to add, in this connection, that what I am 
now proposing, in my chapters on the Propitiation, and Law 
and Commandment, is to bring these points away from the 
wrangle in which they are held, and show them as 
given to intelligence, under the same great analogies w 7 here 
the other christian truths referred to are beginning to be 
received and rested in with such increase of confidence. 

Let me now proceed to add some reasons wdiy a specially 
deliberate attention to this subject of penal atonement 
appears to be demanded at the present time ; and if pos- 
sible some revision of doctrine that will arm us against the 
incoming perils. For it is not any longer to be disguised 
that a time of jeopardy has come, and jeopardy revealed, 
we are not to forget, is God's last impulse of discovery 
for truths the groping ages have missed. A certain gen- 
eral momentum of thought is becoming every day more 
and more pressingly adverse on this particular side of what 
we call our gospel. It rolls in with a steady, sea-surge 
motion, piling tides that even threaten to overtop and com- 
pletely drown out the so called orthodox belief. It is not 
that Unitarian arguments, maintained by Unitarians them- 
selves, are at all more impressive than they have been, but 
that there is a growing multitude in our own churches, and 
a still larger more heavily insurgent multitude outside, who, 



k2 INTRODUCTION. 

in tones that indicate all kinds of tempers, gentle and 
fierce, candid and contemptuous, join their testimony against 
all that we have been calling Expiation and Legal Atone- 
ment. Apologies to save and refortify the ground we 
are losing, even bear a look of exhausted iteration that 
"weakens belief. And what can even new argument do, if any 
such is possible, in upholding, as for God, terms of proceed- 
ing, miscalled ways of grace, which it is getting to be gen- 
erally agreed would forever dishonor a man dealing with his 
fellow. The condemning voices, we have long seen, are 
increasing in number, and their confidence is more embold- 
ened by their better command of their subject. The press 
is theirs, aud they almost take possession of the current 
literature. On what point the movement is advancing, and 
with what results to come, it is not difficult to see ; and a 
great many of the truest and best disciples are quite dis- 
tressed by what looks to them like a day at hand of general 
overthrow. Is it not possible for them to believe that con- 
fidence and hope are still permitted? Let them see and 
be sure that all which their faith stands by is to stand, and 
that only the unwisdoms of men are to vanish away. 

Another consideration must not be omitted ; viz., that 
our modern undertaking of gospel missions abroad requires 
of us a thorough reinvestigation, and, if necessary, a faithful 
reconstruction of our doctrine ; that we may have it inter- 
mixed with no needless offenses, and loaded with no artificial 
impediments. We can not convert the world with an outfit 
which is lumber and not armor. Subordinate truths will of 
course have a subordinate consequence, but the great central 
truth of the Redemption misconceived, or only half con- 
ceived, or mixed with conceptions that are morally revolting, 
will but stumble on its way, and, even if it wins a sort of 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

victory, will come to its end in disastrous overthrow. It is 
unpleasant to be afflicted with misgivings of this kind in a 
work so grandly beneficent and so closely bound up with 
the love of God, but it is not easy to be entirely clear of 
them. By our missions we are now put face to face with 
the whole eastern half population of the globe. Is there no 
reason to fear that we have precipitated ourselves upon 
them without a sufficient understanding either of their re- 
ligious position or their intellectual capacity? or what is 
more to be regretted, without any such preparation of doc- 
trine as would help us to effectually pour in the love of God 
on their subtle refinements and the congeries of theosophic 
delusions they maintain as religions. After twelve or twenty 
years of missionary life among them, Dr. Duff revisited 
Scotland, and published his heavy octavo volume on their 
religious faith and condition. Not long after his return to 
his field he discovered, just what some of us suspected in 
reading his book, that he had missed the point of insight, 
and that back of the coarse and revolting superstitions he 
had looked upon as their religion, they had rich stores of 
learning and philosophy, including much valuable truth. I 
have not seen the retraction he published, but only the report 
of it ; suffice it to say that no such misconceptions are any 
longer possible ; for we know as a matter of common intel- 
ligence that these people have their bodies of literature reach- 
ing back to the earliest ages of human story ; scholars of 
great culture practiced in the subtlest refinements of specu- 
lation ; tenets and maxims of conduct not seldom worthy 
of Christianity itself. 

Now that such peoples, however much impressed with our 
superiority in arms and naval arts, in constitutional law and 
liberty, and above all in material wealth and production, are 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

going to have the faith of a gospel suddenly precipitated on 
them, and become christians by simple notification, is a most 
irrational confidence. Our first thing is to be sure for our- 
selves that the Christianity we o'ffer them is the true, cum- 
bered by no revolting speculations, disfigured by no jargon 
of false theory ; and then that we so far understand their 
religious prepossessions and prejudices that we can make 
our christian approach by fit adaptations, and engage their 
assent by a thoroughly appreciative judgment of their truths 
and errors. They are warming now to a glow, we hear, in 
their own cause, which is proof, beyond a question, that our 
Christianity will gain them only by the mastering of their 
strength, and not by any dictation put upon their weakness. 
As many as eighty newspapers, we are told, have sprung into 
circulation in the native languages of India within a very 
few years. They are almost all in the interest of political 
democracy. Many of them too are discussing the question 
whether Christianity has any claim to being accepted as the 
universal religion, some of them boldly insisting on its 
inferiority to the faith of Buddh or Lao-tse, and stating their 
critical reasons. Chunder Sun, meantime, is pushing out 
through India in his campaign of reform, to new organize 
the old religion ; having already gathered his sixty -five cir- 
cles, or institutes of worship, designing to establish a great 
enduring religion on the roots of the Indian history. We also 
hear that the government University for English culture at 
Bombay, matriculating year by year its eight hundred stu- 
dents, shows them falling off into a general contempt of Chris- 
tianity, and our missionaries, unable to cope with so great 
unbelief, send over to engage one of our ablest and most 
eloquent professors in a course of lectures for their benefit. 
Doubtless he has done all that could be done in that manner, 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

but what can any so casual, or merely occasional effort do for 
the rooting of a faith that has no roots, and scarcely a soil to 
feed them? We are also told by Mr. Nevius, in his late 
interesting book, how the students of Shantung University 
in China carry on their debates with Christianity. They 
object to the trinity as impossible ; also to the incarnation, 
or to the new personality it produces, for like reasons. Then 
also they ask why Christianity so constantly " appeals to 
motives resting upon the doctrine of future rewards and 
punishments, instead of taking the higher ground of urging 
men to the practice of virtue, simply because it is right and 
obligatory?" And then again, " Is it consistent with the 
justice of God to punish the innocent and clear the guilty, 
as he does in visiting the penalty of death on the Saviour, 
and letting the sinner go free ?" The three objections first 
named are intellectual, and may probably be well enough 
removed by a skillful statement, but the last is moral, and 
never was, or can be, so stated as to take away the offense 
it creates. And how many times have our missionaries 
reported this objection made by the malignants of unbelief, 
regarding it, of course, as so much evidence given of their 
reprobate condition ! A very sad thing it is that good men 
can be dealing out offeuse for gospel in this manner, and 
expecting men to be saved by what only shocks the most 
original and best convictions of their moral nature. Is it 
not a matter of supreme consequence in this view, as regards 
our missionary engagements, that we find how to drop out 
of Christ's reconciling work what the Scripture does not 
teach, save in figurative expressions never meant to be under- 
stood as they have been, and put the truth of it in such 
harmony with the supreme beauty and perfectness of God 
as will never shock or repel, but only draw men to its loving 



26 INTEODUCTION. 

embrace. I certainly think it can be done, even as Christ 
himself assumed, when he said, " I will draw all men unto 
me." 

Once more, as we are encountering a new age of doubt 
that disallows the faith of any thing supernatural, and as the 
gospel itself is crowded closer to the wall than ever before, 
because of its intensely supernatural character, we can not 
afford to hold on upon any sort of incumbrance that weakens 
our doctrine or makes it incredible. It must be enough 
that we maintain our ground in what are called offenses 
against reason, without having it put upon us to maintain 
offenses against immutable morality. " Laying aside every 
weight " is even divine counsel for us now, and requires 
us to be stripping here for the freest encounter possible. 
"We must not be hampered longer by volunteer wisdoms 
that choke our breath and stifle our confidence. 

According to our new gospel of naturalism, there is 
nothing to be done for souls in the preparation of charac- 
ter, save by educating, or evolving, or developing, what is in 
them. Development is the word most common, and it even 
begins to be a staple word in sermons ; the conception being 
that there are stock powers on hand that have only to be 
run, or operated under their own natural laws, to develop 
some time or other all the graces of a completely finished 
virtue. At present, or in this first stage, they do not show 
all that can be desired, being under misdirecting circum- 
stance, or cause, or tempestuous appetite or passion. We 
used to call it sin, but the simple fact is, it is now discov- 
ered, that we are doing just as we were made to do, and are 
on the way to get by our misdirections and come out fully 
ripe in good. If we commit murder, it is not wholesome ; 
if we lie, our lie so called is weak, but is in the way to come 



INTRODUCTION. 27 

out just as good as the truth. And so we find a sovereign 
gospel in development that works by nature, no thanks to 
supernatural grace, or help from any quarter. We are kept 
thus in the integrity of reason, it is said. We do not want, 
or believe, any miraGle, or any supernatural person, or in fact 
any salvation; all such incredibles we reject before argu- 
ment. 

Our christian gospel meantime begins at the grand first 
point of depravity and moral incapacity, so finely and with 
such evident truth asserted by Plato. Thus, after showing 
that men are good "neither by nature nor by instruction," 
he answers the question How ? * " This I think could not 
be shown easily, but I conjecture that the property of good- 
ness is something specially divine, and that good men exist 
as prophets do and oracle chanters. For these exist neither 
by nature nor by art, but become such by the inspiration of 
the gods." What height of possibility for man is this, to 
be inwoven thus with God-help and quickened by the 
perfect life of God ! If then some are willing to believe that 
man is a mere animal, grown up to his present pitch of 
capacity by the processes of natural selection, what loss of 
dignity will they look for instead, when, by a selection reach- 
ing downward, he forswears affinity with God? What hope 
is there for man, asks Plato, but in God's inspirations? 
Therefore Christ appears — the Grand Chief Miracle of the 
world — doing every thing he does in human life by miracle, 
if only it were done with outward show to keep the wonders 
manifest. He comes to quicken life where it is gone out. 
He proposes a new birth, and a passing thereby from death 
to life. He undertakes more than to be the power of a new 
development, to be himself the new grain planted for dc- 
* Dialogue on Virtue. 



28 INTRODUCTION. 

velopment. He propounds his mission as the mission of 
a Saviour come to bring salvation. He counts on no stock 
powers in human nature that are going to mend themselves ; 
nothing short of a salvation brought down from out of 
nature and above, in his divine person, can be any suf- 
ficient remedy. This most certainly is what is given us for 
gospel, and this we are firmly to hold and boldly publish. I 
for one believe in it with all my heart. .And if I can not 
have it to believe in, I want no other, more daintily or less 
ruggedly and squarely pronounced. All the better right 
have we therefore to insist that, while we are asserting 
faithfully this supernatural salvation — less popular than it was, 
attacked more frequently by argument, and ready, as some 
think, to be quite gone by — we be not also obliged to 
maintain doctrines of the salvation which are themselves an 
offense to right sentiment and the sturdiest inborn principles 
of our moral nature itself. 

Proposing then, as I do here, a conception of Propitiation 
and of Law and Commandment, that clears all such in- 
cumbrance, I think my argument is entitled, in advance, to 
greater favor and consideration, than it ever could have been 
in any former age of the world. For the time has now 
come, as never before, when the gospel can not afford to 
work at disadvantage and carry weights that do not belong 
to it. 

Since my book was published, a remarkable and very 
able treatise from the London press has come to hand, 
entitled The Nature of the Atonement, by John McLeod 
Campbell. It had, in fact, been published years before, but 
had somehow missed being largely known to us. I have 
Yead the book with much care and profound respect. It 



INTRODUCTION. 29 

deserves to be considered a fresh contribution, where 
contributions not fresh have been so common as to make 
the exception a relief. The atmosphere of the book is 
delightful — pure, sweet, fragrant with celestial unction, offer- 
ing just such flavors of character as make it only the more 
sad fault of his brethren, that they could think it their duty 
to pluck down a teacher so visibly right in his devotion to 
the truth, whatever may be judged of his successes. His 
judgment of Luther and his doctrine is tenderly considerate, 
coinciding entirely with the view I gave in my chapter 
on Justification by Faith, in my former treatise. 
He is far less nearly satisfied with the Calvinistic doc- 
trine represented by Owen, Edwards, and Chalmers, a 
doctrine of penal satisfaction for the sins of the elect, which 
could not therefore be for all, because it would give a legal 
right of salvation to all in like manner. And yet, abhor- 
rent as this whole scheme of doctrine is to his feeling, the 
later scheme is no wise better, which undertakes to make the 
atonement universal, by conceiving that Christ dies, not for 
the satisfaction of distributive justice, but only to maintain 
the authority of moral government by a due impression 
made of God's rectoral, that is, general or public justice. 
Public justice, he still argues, must be justice, else it is 
nothing, and justice is in its very nature personal and dis- 
tributive. So that if the general stock fund of justice laid 
up in God does not somehow- include a personal justice done 
that is practical, it is nothing — or in fact only a vacuum put 
to theologic uses. 

He maintains, in this negative criticism, a spirit of candor 
and deference that will so far incline almost any reader to 
acquiesce in the conclusion at which he arrives; viz., that 

the world is waiting still for a doctrine of the cross that has 

3* 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

not yet been taught in a way to satisfy the rational doubts 
of inquiry. This now lie undertakes in the more positive 
way to supply ; beginning at the vicarious relation into 
which Christ is entered by the love that brings him into the 
world, and the personal identification he acknowledges with 
us in our human nature. It does not set him legally in our 
place, or make him a partaker in any of the liabilities of our 
guilt, it does not allow any such identification with us as 
permits any claim of justice, or any right of punishment 
against him on our account ; but he is so drawn to us 
in his feeling that he has all our burdens upon hiin. So that 
spiritually speaking he is the human race, made sin for the 
race, and acting for it in a way so inclusively total, that all 
mortal confessions, repentances, sorrows, are fitly acted by 
him in our behalf. His divine Son ship in our humanity is 
charged in the offering thus to God of all which the guilty 
world itself should offer. And so his " confession of sin is 
a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the 
sin of man" (j). 196). "He responds in it also to the 
divine wrath against sin, with a perfect response — a response 
from the depths of that divine humanity — and in that per- 
fect response he absorbs it. For that response has all the 
elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin 
of man * * * and by that perfect response in Amen to the 
mind of God in relation to sin, is the wrath of God rightly 
met, and that is accorded to divine justice which is its due, 
and could alone satisfy it," (pp. 136-7). 

Precisely what and how much is to be understood by 
these rather peculiar, untheologi.c modes of expression, I do 
not know. Prof. Park, in a very patient, carefully studied 
article of the Bibliotheca Sacra for April, offers for objec- 
tion, with at least logical justice, that "After having implied 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

that Christ repented of the sins of the race, we do not see 
why Mr. C. need object to the theory that he was punished 
for these sins." He certainly need not, and what is more, 
should not. But is it clear when Mr. C. speaks of repentance 
in this manner that he means any such thing as we com- 
monly understand by the word ? Does he mean that Christ 
forsakes the sin of the world as being in the guilt of it, and 
casting it off with a hard and heavy struggle that amounts 
to a moral revolution of his nature. That Would scarcely 
be a reverent imputation. He speaks, we observe, more than 
once in a way that magnifies " the sorrow " of the repent- 
ance. He also calls the supposed repentance " an expiation 
for sin," several times over (p. 138). As if the superstitious 
ideas of penance had disfigured a little his conception of 
the wholly joyful and free nature of repentance ; counting 
that the godly sorrow that w 7 orketh it stays by as sorrow, 
after it is worked, dragging heavily in it to the end. . And 
yet we are in about the same doubt concerning the meaning 
of Edwards in the passage on which, as we may say, Dr. 
Campbell hangs, in a sense, his whole theory. Thus arguing 
for the necessity of an infinite suffering or sorrow, Edwards 
says that " God could not be just to himself without this 
vindication;" "for there must needs be either an equivalent 
punishment, or an equivalent sorrow and repentance " 
(p. 137). This too he calls "an adequate sorrow" — as if 
the pain, the sufferer's sorrow of the repentance, were its 
chief significance. Can it then be that the religious appre- 
hensions of Edwards were so far let down as to allow his 
putting the alternative thus between the pains of re- 
pentance and of punishment ? Does he really imagine that 
some possible amount of repentance will even the reckon- 
ing of sin, requiring after that no other atonement ? Or is 



32 INTKODUCTIOJST. 

he only using the alternative as a by-play in argument with- 
out any consideration of its merit or possibility ? 

And what again are we to understand by Dr. Campbell's 
figure of absorption ? the repentance wherein Christ in his 
humanity so responds "to the divine wrath against sin that 
he absorbs it." What is absorbed is taken in to be reten- 
tively held ; is the wrath of God so taken in by Christ ? 
That he certainly does not mean. Is it then simply quelled ? 
That would be a very remarkable consequence to follow a 
mere representative repentance for sins, still and always going 
on, not quelled themselves. 

It is even more difficult still to find what is meant by the 
satisfying of God's justice, the repentance offered being that 
response to God's mind in relation to sin, in which " the 
wrath of God is rightly met, and that is accorded to divine 
justice which is its due and could alone satisfy it." Is it 
then a satisfaction of God's justice that it is acknowledged 
to be just ? This would be a new conception both of justice 
and the satisfaction. Besides Dr. Campbell discards all the 
satisfaction theories because they are legal, and the satisfac- 
tion here proposed in the pains of repentance is itself 
altogether legal, and gives a legal title to salvation if it gives 
any thing. On the whole, it does not seem likely to 
me, as these brief strictures will indicate, that his positive 
doctrine is or can be sufficiently established. 



CHAPTER I. 

FOEGIVENESS AND PKOPITIATION, WITHOUT EXPIATION. 

The argument of my former treatise was concerned 
in exhibiting the work of Christ as a reconciling 
power on men. This was conceived to be the whole 
import and effect of it ; just as, in our current 
theology, it is conceived to be a work that reconciles 
God — sometimes a propitiation, such as mitigates or 
conciliates the dispositions of God in the forgiveness 
of sins ; and sometimes, with far less appearance of 
possibility, an expiation that satisfies the justice of 
God, and allows him to yield the forgiveness legally. 

I now propose to substitute, for the latter half 
of my former treatise, a different ex- Proposed re- 
position ; composing thus a whole of vision. 
doctrine that comprises both the reconciliation of men 
to God, and of Gocl to men. I have still as little 
question now as before, that the main significance of 
the gospel is in what it does, or undertakes to do, for 
the reconciliation of men. Indeed, a great part of 
the texts cited for atonement, so called, conceiving 
it as a conciliation of God, have their whole mean- 
ing, if rightly understood, at the other pole of the 

(33) 



34 FORGIVENESS 

subject. And nothing is now so much wanted, to 
set the gospel in its true proportion, as a just reclama- 
tion of these texts in the meaning they have ]ost. 

When we speak, as I am now to speak, of the pro- 
pitiation of Gocl, having it as our assumed under- 
taking to show the fact of such a propitiation ante- 
cedently related to the forgiveness of sins, we seem 
to be thrusting ourselves on a matter high above our 
reach, and in its own nature altogether improbable. 
There is even a look of offense and mortal presump- 
tion in the proposal itself. I am also pressed with 
the conviction that my single arguments first named 
will seem inconclusive, or even weak ; for there is no 
determinate position here to be taken that will turn 
the question logically by itself. I have never handled 
a subject where all the parts and complexities of 
evidence are so necessary to be had in sight together, 
in order to any just impression. In this view, let 
me ask of my reader to go quite through my chapter, 
and get ail my points in view, before he begins to set 
his opinions adversely in finalities of judgment passed 
before the time. 

There is, it is true, one great principle or funcla- 
The one sover- mental fact which runs through the 

eign principle. Tv -] 10 i e subject as presented, and is, in 
a sense, the universal solvent of it, but that will not 
be seen at any single glance, and can not bring God 
into the range of a probable partaker ship with us, in 
the necessities of propitiation, till it has been long 
enough canvassed to reveal what is in it. The fact 



AND PROPITIATION. 35 

of which I speak is the grand analogy, or almost 
identity that subsists between our moral nature and 
that of God ; so that our moral pathologies and those 
of God make faithful answer to each other, and he 
is brought so close to us that almost any thing that 
occurs in the workings or exigencies of our moral in- 
stincts may even be expected in his. 

It has been a question whether to begin this dis- 
cussion at the scripture texts, in which propitiation 
is asserted — as I formerly thought it was not, save in 
a certain objective way of accommoda- Begin at for- 
tion — but as the view I am to advance giveness. 
opened first at the question of forgiveness by men 
toward men, I will start my argument from that 
point, and bring in the scripture proofs farther on, 
where they will have some complexions of thought 
prepared to soften their incredibility. 

I. 

In the New Testament it will be observed that for- 
giveness by God and forgiveness by Forgiveness by 
men are set forth mutually, one by the God and men 
help of the other. "Forgiving one the same - 
another, even as God for Christ's sake [ev Xptfrw] hath 
forgiven you." "Forgive us our trespasses as we 
forgive them that trespass against us." One kind of 
forgiveness matches and interprets the other ; for they 
have a common property. They come to the same 
point when they are genuine, and require also exactly 
the same preparations and conditions precedent. It 



oD FORGIVENESS 

is not commonly supposed, I know, that forgiveness 
by men requires any thing done which is in the nature 
of propitiation. But we had best make nothing of 
that ; for, in fact, the matter of forgiveness by men is 
so indeterminately thought, or so nearly unattempted 
by analysis, that we really do not know what is 
in it, or how it comes, or what it does. We talk of 
it in a certain loose way, but have really no moral 
casuistry by which we regulate our practice in it. 

What then do we mean by forgiveness when we 
speak of forgiving an enemy or wrong doer % — what, 
that is, by a man's forgiveness of a man % I suppose 
that a great many persons never had a thought of it 
as signifying more than the mere passing of the word. 
They even choke at this, and only stammer it in 
under-tone when it is passed. As if the mere getting 
out of the word " I forgive "were the consummation 
of their duty-struggle in the question. 

Nothing is more evident, to any one who cares to 

understand what is to be done in such a matter, than 

that the mere passing of the word forgive constitutes 

no new relation. It may be that the forgiving party 

onlv savs it, iust to be quit of his ad- 

Not negative. J J ' , . ^ _ , . 

versary. He does it as a mere letting 
go, or waiving of the man, not as a true taking hold 
of him rather for eternal brotherhood's sake. He is 
only thinking quite commonly, in this letting go, how 
to be let go himself, and have his obligation ended. 
Sometimes it will be even thought, if not spoken 
aloud, " Yes, I forgive him, but I hope never to see him 



AND PROPITIATION. 37 

again." Or it will be said, " Yes, I forgive, but I 
can never forget." Or, again, " Yes, and I do not 
inncli care whether lie repents of his wrong or not, 
if only I can be quit of all connection with him." I 
can not specify, and need not, all the loose ways and 
turns of mock sentiment, by which this grace of forgive- 
ness is corrupted and made to be no grace at all, but 
only a plausible indifference under the guises of grace. 
It is how often but a kind of hypocrisy under which 
the forgiving man is hidden from his own discovery. 
All this in a way of transition ; the cases referred 
to are only cases where irresponsible, self-serving, 
worldly men, whether nominally christian or not, 
cheapen the duty of forgiveness by light perform- 
ance, or slip it by evasions and tricks of words. But 
there are troubles of mind in respect to The difficulty 
this matter of forgiveness that are real, reaL 

and are encountered by the best and holiest men. 
They mean to be forgiving, and live in the habit of 
it universally. Is it not the love of God that they 
have accepted as their ruling principle and joy — love, 
that is, to every body, including even their enemies ? 
Yes, but the love of God prepares not even him to 
forgive by itself, as we shall by and by see. ~Not 
more certainly will it prepare any best and most 
loving of mankind to forgive. We take up certain 
modes of speaking which imply that love is a kind 
of total virtue, and will carry all other graces and 
virtues with it. And it will, in the sense of causation, 

or of being their causative spring. But it does not 

4 



38 FORGIVENESS 

follow that it will dispense forgivenesses without 
also preparing the necessary antecedent propitiations. 
A good man lives in the unquestionable sway of 
"universal love to his kind. If then one of them does 
him a bitter injury, will he therefore launch an ab- 
solute forgiveness on him ? If he were nothing but 
love — if he were no complete moral nature — he 
might. But he is a complete moral nature, having 
other involuntary sentiments that come into play 
along-side of love, and partly for its sake — the sense 
of being hurt by wrong, indignations against wrong 
done to others, disgusts to what is loathsome, con- 
tempt of lies, hatred of oppression, anger hot against 
cruel inhumanities — all these animosities, or revul- 
sions of feeling, fasten their grip on the malefactor 
sins and refuse to let go. And they do it as for 
society and the law-state of discipline ; composing a 
court of arbitrament that we call moral opinion, 
which keeps all wrong doing and wrong doers under 
sanctions of public opprobrium and silent condemna- 
tion. Filling an office so important, they must not be 
extirpated under any pretext of forgiveness. They 
require to be somehow mastered, and somehow to 
remain. And the supreme art of forgiveness will 
consist in finding how to embrace the unworthy as 
if they were not unworthy, or how to have them 
still on hand when they will not suffer the for- 
giveness to pass. Which supreme art is the way 
of propitiation — always concerned in the reconcil- 
iation of moral natures separated by injuries. 



AND PROPITIATION. 39 

How it is that the forgivenesses of good men so 
often miscarry, will be sufficiently explained by the 
exposition here given. It does not fol- How forgive- 
low that they are to be impeached for nesscs faiL 
obstinacy or insincerity. They meant to forgive and 
make clean work of their forgiveness. But their old 
mind returns upon them and their old animosities 
are rekindled, as if only banked in their fires and not 
extinguished. They look on the faces and hear the 
voices of the men they undertook to forgive, and their 
disgusts come back on them. The old words rat- 
tle as if in new offenses, and there is no moral 
gong at hand by which they can be drowned. Now 
the difficulty very often is that the forgiven party has 
never been so qualified by grace that he could fitly 
be forgiven. But that is no sufficient excuse ; for 
the forgiving party can be right even if there is no 
forgiveness passed. In most cases the true account 
of the matter is that the forgiving party did not find 
how to be fitly propitiated, and was not qualified 
antecedently by such a state of preparation as his 
own moral nature and necessities demanded. What 
he so honestly meant to do, therefore, he is not un- 
likely mortified by and by to discover is not effect- 
ually done. 

True forgiveness then, that which forgives as God 
in Christ hath forgiven, is no such letting up simply 
of revenue against the wrong doer as was first de- 
scribed — no shove of dismission, no dumb turning of 
the back. Xeither is it any mere setting of the will 



40 FORGIVENESS 

to do a deed of love, as we often discover in really 
good men — no drumming of the hard sentiments. and 
revulsions and moral condemnations to sleep. Per- 
haps they were not meant to go to sleep, but to stay 
by rather in such welcome as the new cast of a right 
propitiation will suffer. 

And in order to this, two things are necessary ; first, 
Two things such a sympathy with the wrong doing 
necessary. party as virtually takes his nature ; and 
secondly, a making cost in that nature by suffering, or 
expense, or painstaking sacrifice and labor. The sym- 
pathy must be of that positive kind which wants the 
man himself, and not a mere quiet relationship with 
him ; wants him for a brother, considers nothing to be 
really gained till it has gained a brother. The sympa- 
thy needs to be snch as amounts to virtual identification, 
where there is a contriving how to feel the man all 
through, and read him as by inward appreciation, to 
search out his good and evil, his weaknesses and gifts, 
his bad training and bad associations, his troubles and 
trials and wrongs — so to understand and, as it were, 
be the man himself; having him interpreted to the 
soul's love, by setting all tenderest, most exploring 
affinities in play, finding how to work engagement in 
him, and learn what may best be touched or taken 
hold of in a way to make him a friend. Taking the 
wrong doer thus upon itself, it will also take, in a cer- 
tain sense, his wrong to be foreign ; for its longing is 
after some most real identification with the fellow 
nature sought after. Thus we see that, to really for- 



AND PROPITIATION. 41 

give and make clean work of it, requires a going 
through into good, if possible, with the wrong doer, 
and meeting him there, both reconciled. And when 
it is done thoroughly enough to configure and new-tone 
the forgiving party as well as the forgiven, he is so far 
become himself a reconciled or propitiated man, as 
truly as the other is become a forgiven or restored 
man. Or if the man so propitiated is repelled in 
the forgiveness he offers, he is, humanly speaking, 
but as one that came unto his own and his own re- 
ceived him not. 

But there remains, as was just now intimated, a 
second indispensable condition, by which the ad- 
vances of sympathy, finding their way Making cost for 
into and through wrong doers and enemies. 
enemies, will become a more nearly absolute power in 
them, and a more complete propitiation for them ; 
viz., in the making cost and bearing heavy burdens 
of painstaking and sorrow to regain them and be 
reconciled to them. The injured party has a most 
powerful and multiform combination of alienated and 
offended sentiment struggling in his nature. And, 
in one view, it is right that he should have. He 
could not be a proper man, least of all a holy man, 
without them. His integrity is hurt, his holiness 
offended, his moral taste disgusted. He is alien- 
ated, thrown off, thrust back into separation, by the 
whole instinct of his moral nature. The fires of his 
purity smoke. His indignations scorch his love, and 

without any false fire of revenge, which is too com- 

4* 



42 FORGIVENESS 

Hionly kindled also, lie seems to himself to be in a 
revulsion that he has no will to subdue. He is a 
wounded man whose damaged nature winces even in 
his prayers. So that if he says " I forgive," with his 
utmost stress of emphasis, he will not be satisfied with 
any meaning he can force into the words. Is he 
therefore to be blamed, that he has so many of these 
dissentient feelings struggling in him to obstruct his 
forgivenesses ? ~No, not in the sense that he has them, 
but only in the sense that he does not have them miti- 
gated, or propitiated so as to be themselves in consent, 
or subjected by sacrifice. Let him find how to plough 
through the bosom of his adversary by his tenderly 
appreciative sympathy, how to appear as a broth- 
erly nature at every gate of the mind, standing there 
as in cost, to look forgiveness without saying it, and 
he will find, however he may explain it or not ex- 
plain it, that there is a wonderful consent in his 
feeling somehow, and that he is perfectly atoned 
[at-oned] both with himself and his adversary. 

To explain this whole matter analytically I acknowl- 
edge to be difficult. Let me give it in the concrete 
in three or four examples. The first, which is very 
simple, I will give more at large that Ave may note in 
transition some of the points which are likely to oc- 
cur, on the way to a complete forgiveness. 

Thus you had, we may suppose, a partner in trade 

A case sup- whom you had taken up out of his yery 

posed. dejected lot of poverty. Discovering 

talent and what you thought was character in him, 



AND PROPITIATION. 43 

you took him into confidence, to share your fortunes 
with you. Before you suspected danger from him, 
he had used the name and credit of your com- 
pany, under cover of his legal rights, in a most faith- 
less and cruel violation of trust, such as plucked you 
down out of wealth, and reduced you to a lot of pov- 
erty so nearly complete that you had not even bread 
for your children. But your industry and worth 
brought you up again finally to affluence ; while the 
vices into which he fell brought him down to want 
and hopeless destitution. Meantime, in all the inter- 
vening years you have been remembering his wrong, 
which you could not well forget. His name has been, 
of course, a name significant of bitter wrong in your 
house, and so connected with pain as to be seldom or 
never spoken — a word as it were for the dumb. You 
have said inwardly, " I must forgive," and you have 
meant, on principle, to do it, perhaps really supposed 
it to be done ; but there is, nevertheless, to this day a 
sting in that name, and you do not like to hear it. 
To meet him on the street, or catch the look of his 
face, pains you, and you inwardly shudder as you pass 
him, at the discovery that, christian man as you are, 
you are certainly not reconciled to him, and see not 
how you ever can be. But you are shortly to find 
how you can be. The poor man, going down under 
his vices, loses name and figure and is all but forgotten. 
But you hear that his family are suffering in bitter 
want. Did you not say that you could forgive, and 
what is come now but your opportunity ? You send 



44 FORGIVENESS 

them in supplies and means of comfort, once and again, 
concealing always your name, lest it may seem to "be 
your revenge. By and by his son is arrested for crime, 
and who but you will volunteer to give the needed 
bail ? and that requires your name. At length some 
infectious disease falls on the forlorn being and his 
family, and who will peril life, in giving help and 
watch to people so completely out of consideration ? 
But you said your forgiveness long ago, and what shall 
you do to make it good but go in to minister and be 
their saviour ? The poor fellow turns himself to the 
wall when he sees you and weeps aloud, saying not a 
word, but just covering his face with his hands and 
smothering his broken-hearted shame as he best can. 
Where now, on your part, is the reluctance and revul- 
sion that so often stifled your forgiveness ? Gone, all 
gone, forever ! The word itself is become the sweetest 
of all words. By your painstaking endeavor, and the 
peril you have borne for your enemy, you. are so far 
reconciled in your own nature that you can now com- 
pletely forgive, whether he can rightly be forgiven or 
not. He can not be till he conies into a genuinely 
right mind, though still you none the less truly for- 
give. The -forgiveness in you is potentially complete, 
even though it should never be actually sealed upon 
him. You have taken his sin upon you in the cost 
you have borne for his sake, and what you have borne 
thus freely for him quells that unreducible something, 
that dumb ague of justice that was disallowing your 
forgivenesses. It is even as if there had been a great 



AND PROPITIATION. 45 

sacrifice transacted in your soul's court of sacrifice, by 
which your condemnations that were blocking yonr 
sensibilities have been smoothed and soothed and 
taken away. Under so great patience and cost, the 
forgiving charities are all out in your feeling, fresh 
and clean, and swinging the censers of their worship 
to pay the fragrant honors due. 

Take another example, that is short and sharp, but 
unites all the elements, either by im- Another ex- 
plication or expressly. A noted English ample, 
preacher, traveling on horseback in the country, is 
stopped by a footpad demanding his purse. Asking, 
" Will you let me pray ?" he immediately descends 
and begins a prayer. It is fervently made for both 
parties, and begins forthwith to be answered by a 
thought occurrent that contains the answer ; an answer 
that makes heavy cost for him, and mortgages much 
that is most precious in life's comforts to the robber. 
Rising to his feet he questions how a life so unjust 
and wicked was begun, charges it kindly to some 
sorrowful defect of nurture, some atmosphere of pos- 
itively bad example. Still the wrong and danger of 
it are none the less evident, for it is, how plainly, a 
life that is both against God and against society. 
" Come now," he says, " let me offer you something 
b .'iter. Go home with me and take employment in 
my service. I will see that no human being, not even 
my family, shall know of this affair as long as we live." 
Accepting the offer, the man took service with his 
benefactor, and his crime was never known till it 



46 FORGIVENESS 

was reported, in a voluntary confession from his own 
lips, on the clay of his master's funeral. The cost made 
by this man of God, in taking thus an unknown 
robber into his family, and trusting his and their 
lives to his fidelity, was about as heavy as it well 
could be. How complete also was the resulting for- 
giveness, we can see from the double trust that fol- 
lowed ; the master trusting the man, and the man the 
master, for so many years of trial, in a matter always 
secret between them. 

But we have a larger field of forgivenesses, and we 
are always in it; and here it is even 

Another. . 

our instinct to make cost freely, in order 
to keep our intractable ugly nature pliant to this 
gentle ministry. "We have much to forgive that is not 
done against ourselves, but against our friends and 
fellow disciples, against purity and truth and love, 
against God, and Christ, and religion. And the of- 
fenses done, in so many ways and relations, are often 
dreadfully revolting — -cruelties to the weak, violences 
to the just, vices all disgust, mockeries of what is 
holy, insults to Christ, so that we are set burning, as 
it were, in a kind of divine animosity, such as the 
Psalmist utters in what some hastily reprobate as the 
scandalous zeal of passion, when he says, "I hate 
them with perfect hatred, I count them mine ene- 
mies." He might have been a very great fanatic in 
that key, but he probably was not. God himself is in 
offense in just that way, and ought to be ; only 
he will have it for his merit that, being thus exas- 



' AND PROPITIATION. 47 

perated, lie can, without self-blame, mitigate his of- 
fense and train it to forgiveness. Much easier 
and more natural, at least, is it for us to end off our 
duty to the incorrigible and wicked in our condemna- 
tions. Our drift in tins direction is so strong that 
we sometimes let our prayers scorch heaven over 
them. We forget that we are to gain them and bring 
them into God's forgiveness and ours by making cost 
for them. Perhaps we are sometimes willing to have 
theh- sins make large amount of cost for them — count- 
ing this, it may be, our righteousness. No, it is a 
great mistake, and we really do not mean it. What 
we want, after all, is not to have them get their de- 
serts, but to have them recovered to God and forgiven. 
And that we shall not obtain for them till we begin to 
bear their sin, suffer patiently their unworthiness, 
and work and wait in all painstaking on their insensi- 
bility; and then, when our hard way of natural 
condemnation is duly softened, there is at least a 
chance that theirs may be. No, it must not be forgot- 
ten, that beautiful word of the Master, " Whosesoever 
sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them." We get 
other men's sins remitted ol God, when we are deep 
enough in cost to remit them ourselves. And this 
exactly is the secret of these times of religious fervor 
in communities which are so great a mystery to many. 
The whole christian mind has forgotten to be a judg- 
ing and become a forgiving mind. And it has become 
a forgiving mind by the key of sacrifice and painstak- 
ing cost into which it has fallen. This, observe, is the 



48 FORGIVENESS 

cross, and when a community is in it, forgiveness runs 
full circle, and the church-state is a state of life. 

Now in these three examples given for illustration, 
Yv T e see how it is that forgivenesses in men are ripened 
and fully brought to pass only as propitiations are. 
Also that our human instinct puts us therefore always 
on making cost when we undertake to really forgive. 
Also that human forgivenesses are possible to be con- 
summated only by the help of some placation or atone- 
Propitiationthe ment > or cost-making sacrifice. The 
common exigent forgiving party must be so far entered 
e * into the lot and state of the wrong- 

doing party, as to be thoroughly identified with him, 
even to the extent of suffering by him and for him. 
Some alterative must be taken by the man who will 
truly forgive, that has power to liquefy the indiffer- 
ences, or assuage the stern, over-loaded displeasures, 
of his moral and morally injured, morally revolted 
nature. He may settle into a callous and dull state, 
by just staying at his point of uncaring self-content — 
but his callousness will be simply disendowed sensi- 
bility, and not forgiveness. If the offense he suffers 
from the wrong of his enemy is ever to be cleared, his 
forgivenesses will be drawn out only by such freedom 
in the matter of cost as opens the sluices of his feeling, 
and waters the dry rock about which his indigna- 
tions are smoking. Suffering, in short, is with all 
moral natures, the necessary correlate of forgiveness. 
The man, that is, can not say " I forgive," and have 
the saying end it ; he must somehow atone both him- 



AND PROPITIATION. 49 

self and his enemy, by a painstaking, rightly so called, 
that has power to recast the terms of their relationship. 
So far from its being an absurd thing to speak of a 
propitiation as the necessary precondition of forgive- 
ness, no human creature will ever keep himself recon- 
ciled to his kind, without finding how in some of its 
degrees to practice it. Instead of being a great theo- 
logic mystery, it is even the common exigent of life. 
Doubtless we may live in the consuming thirst of our 
great world-fever and just go along, with no secret 
heart's love reaching after any body, but whosoever 
longs to live in the bright cordiality of As with us, so 
brotherhood, and have the true enjoy- Wlth Cnrist - 
ment of his kind, must atone himself into the gen- 
tleness and patience of love all the way. 

Doubtless it may seem to some to be a hard lot put 
upon us, which requires us to be not only well-doers, 
but atoners also — the world itself to be a Our tragic eie- 
kind of mutually atoning world — so ment necessary, 
that we have it put upon us, not only to suffer for our 
own sins, but also for the sins of those who do us 
injury. This, I say, will seem quite hard to many. 
But it will depend on what kind of world we require 
God to give us. If it must be a world made up of 
facilities, and favors, and all kinds of pleasantness, 
with no hurts suffered, no wrongs done, no liabilities 
of damage, no responsibilities of sacrifice, in a word, 
if there is to be no tragedy, or tragic side, in our life, 
but all sides smoothly rounded alike, then of course a 

plan that is to keep us all, and about all the time, at 

5 



50 FORGIVENESS 

making cost in this manner for the forgiving of bad 
people, may take on a look very forbidding and 
tedions. And yet after all there is no imaginable 
world, I am quite sure, that has a thousandth part of 
the tedium in it which one would have that is wholly 
made up of delectations. Insipid, uneventful, flat, with 
no great sentiments in it, no heroic side in duty, nothing 
heroic any where, nothing to condemn that touches us, 
nothing to forgive because we are not touched — why, 
such a world would even die of inanity. No, let us 
have tragedy and a strong, large mixture of it. And 
then if we chance to be good — good enough to make 
loss for our enemies — what luxury shall we have in our 
forgivenesses and the great sentiments heaved up in us 
as in mighty exaltations, by our experience. Of course 
it is not to be charged against God that he makes the 
bad necessities of our very tragic life. The bad part 
of it is all from ourselves, and the grand atonings 
planned for, to be the universal element, are just that 
cost of experience in which we are most ennobled and 
blessed. Let me have the chance of forgiving my 
enemy, and I have more enlargement of life, a more 
uplifted consciousness, than if I owned the world in fee. 

II. 

Finding, in this manner, how our own moral nature, 

as such, becomes alienated and averted from them 

The great that do us wrong and trample the rights 

analogy stated. f others, and how it tones itself to a 

completely forgiving state only by acts of cost or 



AND PROPITIATION. 51 

sacrifice which are, in proper verity, propitiations of 
itself, it should not surprise ns to find the analogy 
running far enough to comprehend all other moral 
natures, even the highest. And here, as I conceive, we 
get our initiatory point for the true understanding of 
the christian propitiation. We have only to go back 
on the pathologies of our own moral nature, to make 
the discovery that we ourselves instinctively make 
sacrifice, to gain our adversary ; in doing which we 
also gain ourselves. I said that we do it instinctively, 
but I only mean that our moral instincts are so far cast 
in this mold as to induce this kind of action, when we 
are in the highest key of supernatural life and 
exaltation. I wish I could believe that we are always 
in this key ; for it is the infelicity of my argument, in 
this great subject, that I am required to hang it on a 
fact, which alas ! too many have no witness of in their 
own experience. And my fear is that the analogy I 
suggest will be quite insignificant to them, because 
they run their life on so low a key, and make it so 
nearly selfish, that the exalted consciousness, which is 
itself so near akin to God, is not on hand to second 
what I say. How shall it seem reasonable, or even 
properly intelligent, to propose the verification of 
God's way in forgiveness by our own, or the fact of 
his propitiation in order to his forgivenesses by the 
propitiation we instinctively make ready in our own, 
when the mind that is addressed lives in no element 
of forgiveness and propitiation, and has nothing in 
experience to malie so high an ascription seem any 



52 FORGIVENESS 

thing better than a dull extravagance. Let the caution 
here given be taken without offense. 

Still it will be something for such to observe 
how expressly and even formally the indorsement of 
revelation is. given us, for just this free appeal to the 
human analogies. Thus when Christ requires us to 
forgive as God forgives, his apostle turns the doctrine 
boldly round, requiring us to forgive " even as God 
for Christ's sake hath forgiven us." By these words 
" for Christ's sake," en Christo or in Christ, he does not 
mean, as many understand, on the ground of satisfac- 
tion made by Christ — for we plainly enough can not 
make satisfaction for the sin of our enemy — but he 
means that we are to forgive, as volunteering in the 
cost of sacrifice, after Christ's example. Indeed there 
could be no forgiveness in God, on the ground of sat- 
isfaction ; it would only be his admission that nothing 
is any longer due. 

Let it not be suspected that we fall into a case of 
inversion here, that implies mistake in the argument ; 
viz., that we conceive Christ in his forgivenesses, or his 

No mistake in propitiation, to be following the type of 

the analogy. 01irs< Causations and examples imply 
a state of priority or precedence, but a mere analogy 
does not. It only signifies that the two sides of it are 
in correspondence, no matter how. Christ, in all that 
pertains to his propitiation and his forgiveness to ene- 
mies, furnishes the ideas and helps we work by in 
ours, and we are even to allow that we have no com- 
plete adequacy without them ; but our propitiations 



AND PROPITIATION. 53 

and forgivenesses, when these are wrought, suppose 
analogical properties in our very nature, by which 
Christ may set us on working correspondently with 
himself, and forgiving our enemies even as he does his. 

Supposing now the fact of such constituent analo- 
gies existing both in us and him, certain questions will 
arise in pursuing the exposition proposed, that require 
to be answered. 

1. Is it to be understood that Christ goes to the 
cross just to get the reaction of so great c hrist dies not 
suffering on himself, and so to mitigate for the reaction 
or propitiate his own feeling in the way ° l ' 
of preparing to forgive ? That would be a very con- 
strained, self-attentive attitude, and we could not think 
of it with respect. No such thing is implied, or sup- 
posed in the human examples referred to. We do not 
ourselves go into sacrifice for our enemy to gain or 
soften ourselves, but only to help him in his trouble, 
and minister to his bad mind in ways that may gain 
him to repentance ; every thing we do and suffer is 
for his benefit, or for effect on him, only it results 
that our sacrifice affects our mind or disposition also 
towards him. We are in a way of being completely 
reconciled to him, as we hope he sometime will 
be to us. The stress of all we do or suffer is for 
him, and in that consciousness it is that we are atoned, 
having all our aversions, disgusts, and condemna- 
tions liquefied, or dissolved away. In this there is 
nothing artificial or constrained ; we are simply acting 
ourselves into forgiveness towards him in our endeavor 



54 FOKGIVENESS 

to bless him and bring him into a better mind towards 
us. 

% Is it objected that God loves his adversary al- 
God loves his ready, and needs not love him more to 
adversary already. f or gi ve \ Qf course he needs not love 
him more, and it is no office of the propitiation to 
produce in him a greater love for that purpose. The 
propitiation itself proceeds from his love, and is 
only designed to work on other unreducible sentiments 
that hinder his love, in forgivenesses it might other- 
wise bestow. Our own love, as we saw, might be suf- 
ficient if it were not hindered by certain collateral, 
obstructive sentiments, and God is in this moral 
analogy with us. He is put hi arms against wrong 
doers just as we are, by his moral disgusts, displeas- 
ures, abhorrences, indignations, revulsions, and what 
is more than all, by his offended holiness, and by force 
of these partly recalcitrant sentiments he is so far 
shut back, in the sympathies of his love, that he can 
nerve himself to the severities of government so long 
as such severities are wanted. He is not less perfect 
because these antagonistic sentiments are in him, but 
even more perfect than he would be without them ; 
and a propitiation is required, not because they are 
bad, but only to move them aside when they are not 
wanted. They are never to be extirpated from the mind 
of God, but are always to be in him even as parts of 
his perfection ; only they do not act uniformly into his 
character, but casually, when, all things considered, 
they should ; just as we have casual factors letting in 



AND PROPITIATION. 55 

their action here and there among the constant factors. 
God has it for a part of his liberty to be held 
by these casual factors when he should be, and 
not held when he can do better works for his repent- 
ant children by letting forgiveness take their place. 
Propitiation then, as the necessary precondition of 
forgiveness, supposes no necessity that God should be 
made better. And he will forgive without damage to 
his character, just when his love, in making cost for 
his enemy, gains that enemy to himself. The beauty 
of the true conception is that God is not obliged, by 
his side factors or subordinate sentiments, to be ever- 
lastingly disgusted, revolted,, heated with condemna- 
tion, but that he has self-government, and world gov- 
ernment, and full liberty left him. His severities of 
sentiment remain, just as the Red Sea remained after 
the children of Israel passed through. And yet they 
had passed through. 

3. It will be imagined, perhaps, by objectors of a 
different class, that God's holiness, or God > s i 10 ij nesg 
spiritual chastity, puts him in a condi- does not put him 
tion where all the analogies of human out of ana]o ^' 
forgiveness fail. It is enough for us to be a little 
gentled in feeling, to make our forgivenesses flow. 
Whereas he must even morally wrong his own pure 
nature, to forgive any transgression without being 
satisfied for it — as he can be only when some other 
bears the offense and by adequate suffering atones it. 
That is, he can forgive sin only on receiving adequate 
pay! But we never propose that way of forgiveness 



56 FORGIVENESS 

for our human enemy, restricted as we are in our holi- 
ness. It would even subject a man to ignominy to do 
it — all the more certainly if he is counted a specially 
holy man. It is very true that God's offense toward 
sin is deepest because of his holiness. But the depth 
of his holiness will match itself also in the depth 
of his forgiveness. And what do we see but that 
the holiest men, who are the men most deeply wound- 
ed by wrong, forgive most easily. God too holy to 
forgive an enemy ! Rather judge that forgiveness is 
itself the supreme joy of holiness, whether in God or 
man. 
A. It will be imagined that God is in a different 
God has gov- case from ns > m the fact that he main- 
ernment to main- tains a government as we do not, and 
that he is therefore restricted in the 
matter of forgiveness by considerations of order and 
public authority, when we are not so restricted. 
Hence that we may be softened or propitiated towards 
our enemy by what we do to gain him, when God can 
not be without exacting somehow what the penal insti- 
tute of the law requires. I shall have more to say of 
this when I come to speak in the next chapter of the 
necessities of Law. For the present I have these two 
points to put forward as being in themselves sufficient. 
First that no forgiveness, whether by man or God, 
obliterates the fact of a wrong, or at all salves the 
wounds of violated obligations. It operates only on, 
or between, the two parties personally. The bad act 
stands forever, plainly enough, for nothing can efface 



AND PROPITIATION. 57 

or any way alter what is done. The law and its sanc- 
tions also stand as immovable as the eternal morality. 
And the penal sanctions work on still in the man by 
natural causation after he is forgiven, till they are 
worn ont or winnowed away by the supernatural 
causations of grace in his life. Add to this, secondly, 
that we as mortals do in fact govern with God, and are 
held to the maintenance of good government with 
him. Every law of his kingdom is ours. His gov- 
erning interest is ours. We have the same reason to 
be jealous of wrong and shocked by disorder. We 
reign with him in fact in what is his Great Monarchy 
and our Eepublic, and we are just as free to forgive 
and be reconciled as He. 

5. It may be objected that when we are propitiated 
towards our enemy, by the cost we We only pro- 
make for him, the whole process takes P ltiate ourselves. 
place within ourselves, and the forgiving grace is not 
obtained of us by the intercession or mediation of 
another ; whereas Christ obtains the forgiveness of 
sins for us by what he does before God, acting in our 
behalf. Even so, by acting before God ; and yet not 
by acting before God and obtaining from God, as 
being strictly other. That would be tritheism and 
not trinity. Trinity makes him " same in substance," 
not other. We entirely misconceive this acting be- 
fore God, when we make God one and Christ another 
acting in real otherhood before him. The three are 
still the one, and the three-folding is but a plural in 
so many finite forms, used representatively as person- 



58 FORGIVENESS 

ations of tlie infinite One. Their very plurality im- 
plies their acting towards and before each other, in 
which they all become instrumentations for the one, 
but never, in any sense, other. If my right arm had 
grammatic personality in the same sense, it would be 
acting for me, or before me, but not doing any thing 
which I myself, the higher more inclusive substance, 
should not be doing for myself. We get vividness of 
conception for God by the representative action of the 
three ; and God as infinite substance could not other- 
wise be set forth. They are above and below, 
supreme and subject, sending and sent, moving in 
space, taking human body and laying it off, acting 
before, and for, and with, in nature and into nature, 
but when these grammatic personalities are all re- 
solved in their representative import, God is one, 
only so much better known. Hence, or hi this view, 
Dr. Shedd was right, if only his theory had been 
right in other respects, when he conceived God as 
laying his wrath upon himself, punishing himself, sat- 
isfying his own justice out of his own pangs — " him- 
self the judge, himself the priest, himself the sacri- 
fice. 5 ' And the old reformer, John "Wessel, is even 
more explicit in his confession, saying — " God him- 
self, himself the priest, himself the victim, for himself, 
of himself, to himself, made the satisfaction."* It is 
no fault therefore in this behalf that the analogy we 
draw from ourselves, only shows us working out a 
propitiation in ourselves. Christ is not other than 

* De causis incarnaUonis ; c. 1 1. 



AND PROPITIATION. 59 

o 

God in any such way that his propitiation is any the 
less truly a self-propitiation of God. 

G. But it may be urged with emphasis and high 
confidence by some, as being a great No derogation 
derogation from God's honor, to suppose from God ' s honor - 
that he is held in detention, as respects forgiveness, till 
he has first mitigated his opposing sentiments, or let 
Christ clo it by suffering and sacrifice in his behalf. 
That there is nothing to support this objection was 
just now sufficiently shown ; for that which obstructs 
forgiveness in him is not something wherein he is less 
good than he should be, or something wherein he re- 
quires to be made better. The propitiation only takes 
away out of range certain subordinate and partly 
casual sentiments that wait on God's absolute princi- 
ples and purposes, to act as displeasures and revulsions 
may in the toning of his legal discipline, and act no 
longer when their dominating force may properly cease. 

However, I perceive that speculation will easily 
twist this answer out of its proprieties, by questioning 
as to that little word when — Is it true that" God must 
be gained or tempered transactionally, that is by acts 
in time, in order to the letting forth of grace upon his 
enemies ? Certainly not ; there is no such thing as 
date in God's dispositions. They are not dead fact, 
but living factors in his living nature. They con- 
dition each other, as the brain conditions breathing 
and breathing the brain, being such as he generates 
everlastingly between what he feels and what he wills. 
Without such consideration, we seem to be imagining 



60 FORGIVENESS 

o 

often that Christ has come into the world to make 
God better, and we very nearly say or sing it in a 
supposed key of orthodoxy ; hut if we understand him 
rather as having come to show us how God is acting 
himself always into the great time-currents of our 
story, we shall think him far more worthily. For his 
dispositions towards sin are shaped and colored ever- 
lastingly by what he thinks of it, and inwardly con- 
trives and does and suffers for it. And his blessed 
forgivenesses were all in him, and ready grown, before 
Christ arrived, and before the world was made ; and 
what he does among us by his sacrifice is to have its 
value in revealing, under time, how by sacrifice and 
much cost above time, the divine charities were 

God's propitia- always mitigating his dispositions and 
tions above time. fl ow i n g ou t ? as it were, by anticipation 
subduingly on his enemies. The transactional matter 
of Christ's life and death is a specimen chapter, so to 
speak, of the infinite book that records the eternal 
going on of God's blessed nature within. Being made 
in his image, we are able to see his moral dispositions, 
always forging their forgivenesses, under the reactions 
of endurance and sacrifice, as we do ours. And this 
is the eternal story of which Christ shows us but a 
single leaf. 

Beheld in its outward human incidents, it is the 
tragedy of the love of God. And the dispositions of 
God are so wrought up in it, that he is seen embrac- 
ing, not the lovely only, as we are wont to speak, 
when we imagine or teach that love is begotten by 



AND PROPITIATION. 61 

loveliness, but embracing the bad or unlovely in prof- 
fers beforehand of forgiveness. Most human love is 
unsacrificial love, thinking only to make fit answer to 
the lovable. We never go beyond this, till we make 
loss, and sacrifice, and cost, for some adversary of 
ours, or of goodness. By these propitiated, we for- 
give. All God's forgiving dispositions are dateless, 
and are cast in this mold. The Lambhood nature is 
in him, and the cross set up, before the incarnate Son 
arrives. His own love bows itself to endurance, by 
the prescriptive habit of his eternity, and the forgive- 
nesses shown us in their formative era, so to speak, 
under the great transaction of Calvary, are hi fact 
the everlasting predispositions of his nature. The 
cross, ah ceterno, is in them — " the Lamb that was slain 
from the foundation of the world." 

We can not have a God in fit sensibility unless the 
ante-mundane touch of it is -in him. He can not be a 
forgiving God, if he is yet to begin the making cost 
for an enemy. A God therefore whose eternity has 
been impassible, untouched by suffering experience, 
will never be at all relational to my experience. He 
is wood, he is granite, or no better. What can 
he do for me, when he can not feel me? and what 
can I offer him, when he can not feel what I offer ? 
If he is pleased with my good, he must have some 
feeling of my not good, and that is dis-pleasure, 
which is so far suffering. Just consider at this gate, 
as it opens, what a living God must suffer and be 
suffering always in his good sensibility. He pities, 



62 FORGIVENESS 

and pity going through a bad soul or body, by in- 
ward inspection, has how much to look upon that is 
painful. He abhors a wicked and cruel soul, and 
what is abhorrence but a recoil that is, at least 
etymologically, related to horror. In a vile and filthy 
mind he encounters disgust, and what is that but 
to suffer ? All the persecutions of his friends, all the 
rage and scoffing of his enemies, all the hate and 
hatefulness of natures made for love, all desecrations 
of his honor, all perversions of his truth, impurity, 
lust, diseased inheritance — what are all these things 
to God's pure sensibility, since he has it, but evils to 
bear, offense's to suffer, such as can be forgiven only 
by a nature whose dispositions have been config- 
ured to sacrifice and cost, before the worlds were 
made. It is in God's character everlastingly, if we 
should not rather' say his nature, to be always endur- 
ing the bad in their badness, and so melting his way 
lovingly through into forgiveness. Benefactor thus 
to all, and king of joy as of sorrow to himself. If 
his streams ran all one way, he would be too simply 
placid to be great, but he lives in everlasting counter- 
tides of struggle and victory — victory both over ene- 
mies without and violated good in himself. What is 
to come of all moral natures created, he well under- 
stood before their creation, and he peopled the world 
with them as one girding himself for war ; that is, to 
live and reign by the mastery of their evil, including 
all the disasters to feeling in which evil comes. Thus 
he began early, as it were, in affliction for the bad, or 



AND PROPITIATION. 63 

only partly good ; for " in their affliction he was af- 
flicted, and he bare and carried them all the days of 
old." And so along down through the smoke of the 
ages — why not say of the eternities — he has been joy- 
ously " enduring the contradiction of sinners against 
himself," propitiated by his endurances, and so at 
all times ready to forgive their sin. And this exactly 
is the truth that Christ impresses by the aifectingly 
beautiful short chapter of his story — it is the inward 
going on of God's nature in the sacrifices of love. He 
hates and abhors as we do, only never with a trace of 
malignity. His indignations burn hot against the out- 
rages of wrong ; just as in what we call our remorse, 
it is the terrible orge of our own bosom that scorches 
and scathes our sin, doing it, as it were, benignantly 
and without injustice. So in respect of all God's 
sensibilities, forgivenesses, and sacrifices. 

III. 
Plaviug made our statement thus of the christian for- 
giveness and propitiation, interpreted and represented 
by analogies in our own human sentiment and prac- 
tice, it now remains, going into the scripture, to find 
how far we are borne out by it in the doctrine pro- 
posed. Everything turns here, it will be discovered, 
on the meaning of sacrifice. And we The scripture 
have three sets of words, in our three statement, 
scripture languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the 
English, in and by which the meaning is to be de- 
termined. In the Hebrew scriptures the word is 



64 FOKGIVENESS 

uniformly kaphar. This is translated in the Sep- 
tuagint and the ISTew Testament by hilaskomai. And 
this again is translated in the English by reconciliation, 
atonement, and propitiation ; by the first in a very few 
cases only; by the second almost uniformly in the 
English Old Testament ; by the third as uniformly in 
the English New Testament. Only the JSTew Testa- 
ment has the word reconciliation," several times over ; 
translating, however, another and wholly different 
word, that has no altar significance at all, and is 
therefore to be wholly disregarded in the inquest we 
are making. 

We begin then at the Hebrew word kaphar, which 
is, in fact, the English word cover, the idea being that 
the sin is covered, hid, taken away by the sacrifice. 
And this idea it will be seen is not far off from the 
idea of a smoothing away of the offense, a mitigation, 
a placation, a propitiation of the mind offended, 
which appears to be an element of meaning always 
present in the uses of the word. Thus if we step 
aside in the Old Testament from the altar uses of 
this word, we fall on examples, in common life, where 

Usus loquendi the real usus loqiiendi is plainly discov- 
decisive. ere( j . as w h en Jacob says, sending 
on his drove to meet Esau, his righteously offended 
brother ; "I will appease him with the present that 
goeth before me."* The word of appeasement or 
propitiation here is kaphar, the altar word, showing 
beyond a question, what ideas or impressions it has 

* Gen. xxxii, 20. 



AND PROPITIATION. 65 

there carried. We have another example of the same 
word exactly correspondent : " The wrath of a king- 
is as messengers of death, bnt a wise man will 
pacify it."* Here the smoothing, mitigating, mollify- 
ing, placating, element is conspicuous as before. 

Passing next to the Greek word of the Xew Testa- 
ment, by which the Hebrew haphar is translated, we 
look again for the true usus loquendi, to examples 
not occurring at the altar and under the altar 
forms, because collateral examples are a great" deal 
more significant and decisive as to the true genius 
of the word. Thus we fall on the prayer of the 
publican — f " God be merciful to me a sinner." Here 
the " be merciful " is the old altar word of sacrifice 
hilaskomai used in the Passive Imperative, saying 
literally, " be thou propitiated, or propitiate thyself, 
bend thyself on me in forgiveness " — showing very 
clearly how the element of placation, or propitiation, 
has been connected always with the word in the uses 
of the altar. We also discover a little way off 
two cousins in the family of hilaskomai, hileos and 
anileus which may be taken as witnesses to the 
dispositions of the family. Thus we read, :£" I will 
be merciful [propitiated in feeling] to their unright- 
eousness." And again § a he shall have judgment 
without mercy " [unmitigated, unappeased judgment] 
" that showed no mercy." 

As regards the English words that are used to 
represent the two Hebrew and Greek words, the re- 

* Prov. xvi, II. f Luke xviii, 13. % Ileb. viii, 12. § James ii, 13. 
6* 



00 FOKGIVENESS 

markable thing is that they so nearly agree. Thus 
the word reconciliation employed in translation, to 
carry a meaning that belongs to the altar, has the 
element of conciliation visible on its face. As when 
we read, "to make an end of sins, and to make 
reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlast- 
ing righteousness," the meaning would not be essen- 
tially different if it were written " to make propitia- 
tion for iniquity.'*^ The word atonement ■, more fre- 
quently used, carries the same element of concilia- 
tion or propitiation in a different manner by just 
naming the results; that is to at-one ; for this is the 
old English word in the old English way of print- 
ing, and the word, in that original use, never meant, 
as now, to make amends, which is a perfectly un- 
christian use, but to gather into accord as by love 
and cost and heavy expense of feeling. The ~New 
Testament English word propitiation coincides with 
these other two, without more than a shade of 
difference. 

"We are ready therefore now, after sifting all these 
words with as much of accuracy as we are able, to go 
back first upon the Old Testament sacrifice and settle 
the significance of it, showing also how, or by what 
means, it obtained that significance. And here the 

Old Testament first thing to be noted is that it 
sacrifices. makes nothing of the pain of the vic- 
tim. Nothing is ever clone to increase the pain of 
the animal when slain, and there is never any thing 
* Daniel ix, 24. 



AND PROPITIATION. 67 

said which indicates the least mental attention to 
it. The pain is plainly a matter of supreme indiffer- 
ence. The next thing is, that there is no vestige of 
retributive quality in the sacrifice. The smoke is to 
be rolled up as a sweet smelling savor, and not as a 
smoke of retribution. The associations never once 
suggest retribution. Thirdly, there is no compensa- 
tion in the sacrifices. They are never proposed in a 
way of payment, or of obligation compounded. They 
are not satisfactions, nor any way linked with ideas 
of satisfaction — no man's lamb pays for his sin. 
Fourthly, they are never offered as a legal substitu- 
tion. There is a certain mystic and ritual way of 
substitution* practiced indeed, as when the worship- 
er puts his hands on the head of the sacrifice, or 
on the head of the goat, driven out to signify the 
deportation of his sin, but nobody ever imagines, 
unless it be to make out some point of theology, 
that the animal is held in legal substitution. To 
have the sins legally on him, the goat must be 
a legal subject, else they are as little on him as 
they would be on a barrow or a cart. Doubtless 
they are on him in a figure, and then of course their 
deportation is signified in a figure — the reality of 
which will be, that the faith of the transgressor makes 
what he is thereby helped to believe, an actual and 
free deliverance. 

But what of the blood ? for the sacrifice is a rite of 
blood ; as if it were not in God's nature, some shal- 
low casuist will often object, to be any more pacified 



68 FORGIVENESS 

towards sin, or at all mitigated in his wrath, except 
No demand of by the sight of blood ! Somebody, that 
blood as blood. is? must Tbieed for it, else there is no 
forgiveness. In which way of speaking, the impres- 
sion is that blood comes into the sacrifice invested 
with all our freezing conceptions of guilt, because 
no otherwise but by its horror-dripping stains could 
God find fit expression made in the sacrifice, of our 
detestation of the sin we come to have forgiven. But 
we greatly mistake if we suppose that any so deli- 
cate impression of blood was ever felt among those 
old pasture-men of the East, with whom sacrifice 
began ; accustomed as they were to the killing of 
some animal from their herds, at their tent door, 
three or four times a day, and trained to use the 
knife even from childhood. But there was a more 
genuine, really delicate impression of blood prepared 
in their minds, by artificial, institutional causes, 
which having been prepared for that purpose, were 
the reason why so much is made of bleeding and 
blood in the sacrifices. The problem was to make 
the sacrifice a power, lay collecting about the victim 
intensely sacred impressions. And to this end a 
statute was passed concerning blood, at a very early 
period, which was in fact the fountain of all mean- 
Blood made ^ n S m sacrifice, even down to the sac- 
sacred for the rifice of Christ himself. * " For the 
altar - life of the flesh is in the blood, and I 

have given it to you upon the altar to make an 

* Lev. xvii, 11, 12, and 14. 



AND PROPITIATION. 69 

atonement [or propitiation] for your souls ; for it is 
the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. 
Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul 
of you shall eat blood. Whosoever eateth it shall 
be cut off." These worshipers of the old time took 
nothing in their religious experience by definition or 
analysis, they experienced only what they saw or 
acted. And God gave them a symbol of something 
sacred by which to come before him, viz., blood made 
sacred by being separated from every other use ; the 
idea being that, in having offered their holiest and 
best thing to God, they have made an expression that 
carries the strongest sense of their sin, and will most 
certainly conciliate the offended purity of God. 
They have offered up even life, that mystic power 
enshrined in blood, the deepest, holiest secret of the 
creation, more significant than all the most hidden 
treasures and choicest gems of the world. Bahr, 
who has carefully investigated the ancient statute 
just cited, makes the sacrifice " an appointment of 
God, to signify the yielding up of the soul of the 
sacrificer (symbolized by the blood or life of the vic- 
tim) to God as a condition of acceptance." But it 
needs to be added after this, that there is a power and 
value in the blood of the rite, over and above what it 
signifies to the worshiper in the matter of his own 
particular use as moving from himself. For God 
ordains the offering, and it is God that puts the life 
in the blood, and hedges about the blood with all 
most scrupulous sanctities, for the fit impression of 



70 FORGIVENESS 

the worshiper, and also for his own high part in it. 
And he it is that says — I have given it to yon upon 
the altar ; for it is to be the token also of my cost, and 
of what I have been pledged, from all past ages down- 
ward, to accomplish for the forgiveness of the sins 
of the world. In this giving up of blood and life 
behold what I will sometime do for the reconciling 
of transgression. Let this seem to be only a conceit, 
if any one please, for it is not said in words, but time 
will by and by say it loud enough to end all doubt. 
For whether we imagine it or not, this rite of sacrifice 
begun, this bleeding ou,t of sacred life, is going shortly 
to be lifted in its range, and it has been ordered in 
the main for that very purpose. Just as all the 
higher, finer words of our dictionaries climb up out 
of low base levels in things, and take significances 
rich enough for their ennobled service. What if 
there chance to be something here, in this humble 
offering of lambs, that will sometime be made to 
represent the sacred and dear life of Christ, offered 
up at greater cost to God's feeling than any thing 
ever was or could be to ours. And what if that 
simple designation " Lamb of God that taketh away 
the sin of the world " — defining nothing, spinning no 
analogies — were just wept into the world's heart and 
left to quicken the feeling of a new life, how cer- 
tainly would the sinning myriads of the world begin 
to confess, This surely is the body that was prepared, 
this must be the atonement indeed. 

Even so ! this is the Sacrifice that all sacrifices were 



AND PROPITIATION. 71 

looking after and climbing np to behold. They were 
the literal base-level sacrifices, offered Figures of the 
by priests and by fire upon an altar, true sacnfico - 
atoning the man by what he offered, and also God by 
implication — engaged to be atoned on his part by 
these hallowed symbols of cost, in the blood and the 
life. Whereas in that other better Lamb of Sacrifice, 
that really true sacrifice that was foreshadowed, there 
is neither any lamb at all nor any sacrifice, and it is 
only meant to be a sacrifice a great way out of cor- 
respondence, that we may not class it, too closely, 
with the very dull and prosy* rites which have had 
their nses now fulfilled, in preparing a language for 
something more significant and in a higher key. The 
real truth, if we tell it as it is, makes the sacrifice a 
murder, and the blood on Calvary the blood of mur- 
der : there is no altar, no fire, no priest ; it is simply 
the act of a mob outside of the temple and the city 
gibbeting the Sacred Life yielded up to their fury. 
And what they have done is called the sacrifice, in a 
word that would even be irony, if it did not cover 
the awfully transcendent, interior fact, of a cost so 
terrible, endured by the feeling of God. This is the 
blood, and this the life, expected of old, when the 
blood and the life were consecrated by the statute of 
the altar. Looking on here with our eyes, we see 
nothing religious, even the offering is wholly blank 
to us, only that the world itself, shuddering and dark- 
ening into night, tries visibly to be telling us some- 
thing of it, if it could ! There is at any rate no 



72 FORGIVENESS 

atonement in the form. The blood of the murder 
buys nothing as in pay, wins nothing as by suit or 
compensation, mitigates no feeling of God that we can 
see, as by intercession before him ; and yet there is 
to God, in his own deep nature, a propitiation accom- 
plished for sin, because of the divine Lambhood that 
has been lovingly offered in the smoke of so fierce 
transgression. 

Our scripture excursion comes round finally, after 
the wide range taken, to be concluded by the famous 
full-period text of Paul in his epistle to the Romans, 
So comes the " Whom God hath set forth to be a pro- 
propitiation, pitiation, through faith in his blood,"* 
&c. I do not cite the whole passage, but only the 
first two clauses, reserving the part that is left to be 
used hereafter, when the matter of justification is to 
be discussed. Three points noted, in the briefest 
manner possible, will sufficiently indicate the import 
of the words. (1.) There is a propitiation accom- 
plished in Christ's fife, and especially in his very tragic 
death, which prepares a way of forgiveness for the 
sins of the world. The forgiveness now will be more 
than verbal, it will be real, clean, complete. (2.) It 
is God himself who is forward in this transaction — 
" Whom God hath set forth." It is not Pilate who 
has done it, not Caiaphas, nor the soldiers, but it is 
that God has suffered them so far to make irruption 
upon his throne, and pluck down him, who by the de- 
terminate counsel and foreknowledge was delivered 

* Romans iii, 25. 



AND PROPITIATION. 73 

into their hands ; for how can it be imagined what 
the propitiation can do, save as it is set forth by the 
worst that sin can do, worsted itself in turn by the 
blood of its crime ? And (3) this propitiation is to be 
received only by faith — a " propitiation through faith 
in his blood." For it is this faith in fact which 
makes the murder a sacrifice ; which it does by ac- 
cepting it as the sacred altar-blood and life, and be- 
holding in it that sublime act of cost, in which God 
has bent himself downward, in loss and sorrow, over 
the hard face of sin, to say, and saying to make good, 
" thy sins are forgiven thee." 

IV. 

The propitiation that was necessary to forgiveness 
we have now discovered and constructively verified, 
under its human analogies ; but there is a very im- 
portant objection to propitiation itself A great stand- 
that requires to be removed^-an objec- in £ ob J ectlon - 
tion that is incurred by every scheme which assumes 
the word propitiation, as truly as by that which I 
have here proposed. The need of any such mitiga- 
tion or amendment in God's dispositions, supposes, it 
is often maintained, to just the same extent, his spir- 
itual defectiveness ; and the fact of his being thus 
amended by a transaction in time, supposes an im- 
provement, to the same degree, and a correspondent 
derogation from the stability or immutability of his 
character. I have been discussing, before, an objec- 
tion closely related to this, and yet very different. 



74 FORGIVENESS 

There the question was how God can have his dignity, 
when he is supposed to be transaction ally mitigated 
by what is done or suffered in time ? Here the ques- 
tion is, how he can have his dignity, when his eternal 
mind itself requires to be propitiated, in order to the 
supreme act of goodness to an enemy. The argu- 
ment of the two questions, wide apart as they are in 
their nature, runs more nearly in the same vein than 
might be wished. But the objections themselves are 
so very important, that small varieties of treatment 
may have their use. I have said already that the 
propitiation, so called, is not a fact accomplished in 
time, but an historic matter represented in that way, 
to exhibit the interior, ante-mundane, eternally-pro- 
ceeding sacrifice of the Lamb that was slain before 
the foundation of the world. In saying this I am 
not striking the predestination string of Calvinism, 
but am simply finding how the everlasting God, in a 
particular year of the calendar, viz., the year of 
Christ's death, was gained representatively to new dis- 
positions, and became, in some new sense, a Saviour — 
incredible, impossible as it may seem — and how, in 
fact, he proved himself the more grandly, in that he 
here sets forth in time and story, what occupies, and 
fills, and glorifies, the whole interior working of his 
own eternity, and could by no other method be fitly 
revealed to mortal apprehension. The great salvation 
was not, in this view, wrought by the new composure 
of God in that particular year, but it was set forth 
as an everlasting new composure, so to speak, made 



AND PROPITIATION. 75 

evident in that year's doings — " Whom God hath set 
forth to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to 
declare his righteousness in the remission of sins that 
are past, through the forbearance of God." Faith 
only sees, in the outward blessing of to-day, what 
covers matter going on before, in the eternal, inward 
proceeding of his mind towards human creatures and 
affairs. 

Now if it shall seem to some that, in thus removing 
our objection, we very nearly make a nullity of the 
gospel itself, reducing it to a fact significant in what 
it shows only, and not in what it is or does, I will 
not stop to inquire how far the same kind of doubt 
hangs over every thing, but will hasten to concede 
that a great part of mankind, trained to no such 
modes of thought, will undoubtedly best appropriate 
the gospel, by keeping down as closely as possible on 
the level of a transaction in time. Indeed, there 
is some doubt how far it may be needed for us all, to 
stay by the historic forms, and see the gospel clone 
transactionally in time — to hear the word of Jesus, 
watch his healings, read his face, study his master- 
hood, bow down with him in Gethsemane, die with 
him on the cross — only w T e may have it as our 
privilege, I think, when our mind recoils from the 
tremendous difficulty of propitiation itself, to carry 
the whole matter up above the ranges of time, and 
look on him who stands there " in the midst of the 
throne, as it had been a Lamb- slain from the founda- 
tion of the world." 



76 FOEGIVENESS 

But there is yet another way, if really it be another, 
Another solu- as I think it is, of removing this, to 
tion. some it may be, rather intractable ob- 

jection. "We do not properly conceive God's attri- 
butes, when we. pack them as so many solid blocks 
of perfection in his perfect nature. Least of all do 
we fitly conceive his sentiments and dispositions in 
that manner. If we take his wrath-principle as one 
block, calling it his justice; his omnipotence as 
another, able to do any thing which can be thought ; 
his will-principle as another, essentially autocratic and 
absolute; his hatred-of- wrong-principle, in deifically 
fixed animosity, as another ; and then if we bring 
in the patiences, and tender charities, and the vica- 
riously suffering grace, it will be very difficult to 
make blocks of them any way, and, when they flow in 
through the interstices, they will have power to move, 
configure, combine, compelling all the others to offer 
them a yielding side, and to come into a newly con- 
structed whole. Indeed, it will begin to be as if they 
were all being propitiated. They are no more 
blocks, in fact, but elements of life rather, flowing 
pervasively into, and among, and over, and under, 
and through, one another — liquids all, flowing in to 
liquefy, and temper, and color, and sweeten each other, 
in such way as to compose a perfect rule, and a grand 
harmonic character. And this harmonic character 
will so be cast as to keep all purpose, sentiment, and 
disposition chiming with the wants, conditions, 
wrongs, relentings, personal affections, providential 



AND PROPITIATION. 77 

changes, and prayers of the world. And what have 
we thus, in the eternal going on of God's interior 
nature, but an eternal going on of propitiations, ready 
for every human creature in his time. 

It may occur to some as a very strange thing, 
amounting, in fact, to another objection, that God 
should be any way restricted in his forgivenesses, 
when the mere instinct of kind or natural paternity 
is so free, and drops out all displeasures God has no 
with such prompt facility. Why is reluctance here. 
God to be gained as one who forgives reluctantly? 
Should not such a being have his pardons ready 
beforehand 1 Why, a human mother in her simple, 
motherhood nature — is she not good enough to for- 
give an erring son, without parley, or without a 
question ? She may do it, I answer, simply because 
she is not good enough to raise the parley, or to make 
it a moral affair at all, when of course it is not 
forgiveness. In every true moral transaction the 
thing done is made ready by moral dispositions pre- 
pared for it. Let us not be in haste to measure God's 
forgivenesses by the mother-pardon spilled on a repro- 
bate son. Expecting in God what we boast in her, we 
should certainly do Him great irreverence. As if the 
mere maternity of natural instinct, having no moral 
ingredient whatever, could be cited as a match and 
parallel for the clean, everlastingly sealed acceptance, 
and moral embrace of God. Just contrary to this, 
the wrath or offended holiness, the pure sensibilities, 

shocked by disgust, the moral repugnances and dis- 

7* 



78 FOKGIVENESS 

pleasures, the •immovable indignations, must not 
hurry to clasp a wild and filthy reprobate. Probably 
God has nature-sentiment enough in him to do even 
that, but so far and in that point of view, he would 
really need to be made better ; to go up out of his 
nature-plane into the moral, and prepare a moral 
settlement based in a moral forgiveness. And yet as 
we have said many times over, he has done it — did 
it eternal ages ago — moving so promptly and with 
such spontaneous facility that the grace is ready 
long before the man arrives to receive it. If there is 
any look of reluctance in the matter, it is that the 
propitiation requires to be revealed by a transactional 
process, and that the subjects to be forgiven are so 
very slow in coming to the point of faith that makes 
forgiveness possible. And yet, though done as in 
the general and before time, it is a grace so personally 
guaged and tempered when it is inwardly pronounced, 
that each may say, along down the ages, with even a 
better right than if the Master had kissed a farewell on 
his cheek — " who loved me and gave himself for me." 
Closing here my argument for the propitiation, I 
think I shall be permitted to speak of the religious 
ideals of benefits to be expected from the wor- 
God. thier and better ideal conceptions of 

God, that will of course go with it and keep it com- 
pany. Every strongly variant or peculiar type of 
thought concerning God, carries with it an ideal of 
God proper only to itself. Thus from his creatorship, 
and especially from the great and scientific, world- 



AND PROPITIATION. 79 

massing facts of astronomy, we are set upon the 
idealizing of God as a being omnipotent. And so 
strong is the impression we receive, that it not un- 
likely gulfs every other, even the impression of his 
responsibility to right. He becomes, in chief signifi- 
cance, the Almighty, and what after that, many are 
not much concerned to know. All theological ques- 
tions involved in human liberty, are brought to an 
end, by the fact that God can do any thing which 
either he or we can think. In the same way, it is 
often declared to be the praise of Calvinism that it 
makes God "big" by the autocratic rule of his 
decrees and predestinations. So that holding us fast 
in the vise of his sovereignty, and bending us down 
always under the overhang of his will, the awful dis- 
cipline makes imprints of authority and law, that 
fasten immovably both society and religion. Again 
there is a certain ideal of God which is raised by our 
orthodox modes of legal atonement, such as deal in 
substituted punishment, satisfactions of justice, com- 
pensations, governmental equivalents, remissions 
bought and paid for — where nothing turns upon a 
sympathy or feeling, but every thing on a computa- 
tive calculation, sharpened to the point of a jot or 
tittle of the law. Here the ideal raised is that of 
an exact or stringently exacting God, and the impres- 
sion is not altogether ill, if it were not so far mixed 
with offense as to cause revulsion only, in all the 
broadly generous, thoughtfully circumspect natures. 
Another ideal of God, much valued by many, does not 



80 FORGIVENESS 

come in as a resultant, but is directly chosen for its 
own sake, and is called the Fatherhood of God. It 
has the merit of raising no offense, but there is such a 
certainty of diminution for God in any merely human 
type of paternity, that he is too inefficiently con- 
ceived in it for any strain of high-going rule or en- 
deavor. What I am here proposing in the way of 
propitiation begins at the summit of God's eternity, 
where he lets in sorrow in the right of his supremacy, 
bathing his will in it when he reigns, recognizing 
always, and expecting always to recognize, the fact 
that it belongs to every moral nature, as truly to 
atone its adversaries, as to observe equity with its 
friends. He is brought down thus, or, shall we rather 
say ? brought up, before the worlds are made, into the 
Passive Virtues. For he it is that accepts them by 
spontaneous choice, in advance of all creatures, and 
counts all other good too dry for joy without them. 
They are with him in the beginning of his way, and 
before his works of old. He creates the world thus in 
their counsel, consenting to have it on hand as a bad 
world, because in them he has found a ransom. The 
dread possibility of sin, incidental to the existence of 
moral natures, does not prevent his act of creation ; 
for his great love wants them nigh, and the Patience 
of Sins is in him, able to bear the cost of their 
undoing and deliverance ; so that when the outbreak 
comes, he is able to let it be, able to suffer it and for 
it, able to rule it, in the Kingly Majesty of his 
Patience. 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 81 

V. 

To avoid the confusion that might be created by 
bringing into my argument another and very different 
matter, and having on hand for discus- What of 
sion two important issues at once, I expiation, 
have carried along the great subject of propitiation 
to its final conclusion by itself. Still my argument 
is not finished when I thus ignore the other issue re- 
ferred to, and pass it wholly by without notice or 
attention. I go back, therefore, now to the point 
where that other question might have come forward 
also to claim its part in the discussion, and resume the 
investigation at that point. Having found that the 
two words of sacrifice in the Hebrew and Greek scrip- 
tures, kaphar and hilaskomai, bear a sense of miti- 
gation, and in that manner of propitiation, I consid- 
ered the latter to be sufficiently established as the 
meaning also of the christian sacrifice. But it hap- 
pens that the Greek word is used also in the classics, 
where I am not able to deny that it is largely or 
quite commonly used to signify expiation. And so 
the question is raised whether, after all, expiation is 
not a meaning in these words, compatible with the 
Scripture uses. In this manner we have the question, 
Propitiation, or Expiation? back upon us in the alter- 
native, and the whole budget of doubt is loose again. 

We are also the more heavily pressed by the ques- 
tion in this form, that our orthodox theologians and 
confessions are all the while saying expiation for the 



82 FORGIVENESS 

christian sacrifice, without any apparent suspicion 
We go to the of impropriety. They even go to the 
classics. classic historians and poets, to cite 
instances of expiation as proofs of the necessity of 
sacrifice, and do it without any misgiving or scruple. 
Happily our English scriptures are clear of this im- 
peachment, for the word expiation is not once found in 
them.* Indeed, I think our* English translators are 
shy of so heathenish a word, as they very well 
might be. 

In the facts that are classed as expiations, there is 
of course a very great diversity, but they are discov- 
ered, when closely examined, to be all alike defective 
Worst and best in principle. We may take as a 
examples. worst and most shocking example, the 
spectacle of human fathers and mothers whipping 
their children through beds of fire, to please some god 
who is turning plague, or battle, or weather against 
them. Or if we prefer to look on a best example 
rather, I remember no instance at all comparable, in 
dignity or benignity, with the legend of the Roman 
Curtius, plunging headlong man and horse into 
the gulf which had opened in the ground of the 
forum, and which it was declared, by some oracle, 
should never be closed till the glory of Rome was 
thrown into it. A truly grand patriot we have in the 

*It is supposed to have come into English from the Vulgate, and 
not till shortly after the translation. However, the translators, who 
learned half their theology from the Latin, must have been familiar 
with it. 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 83 

man ; who would yet have been as much more en- 
nobled if he could have seen how mean the oracle, 
and contemptible the god, and stood back from the 
sacrifice. Clearly enough there is nothing to be car- 
ried back into Christianity from such examples. A 
suffusion of the mere idea breeds inevitable confusion 
in the doctrine, and a great part of the trouble we 
have in our efforts to settle the christian truth, is 
caused by the admission of this false element. 

The divergence it creates begins to be evident, 
when it is observed that we propitiate only a person, 
and expiate only a fact, or act, or thing ; winning, it 
may be, any sort of favor, good or bad, by the pains 
undergone. Propitiation seeks the preparing always 
of a disposition morally right and good. Expiation 
is indifferent, caring never for the What expiation 
morality or justice of what is gained, does - 

but only for the agreeableness of it. No righteous 
being or god is propitiated by any contribution of 
pains, as being pains, or by any kind of naked suffer- 
ing ; but such pains are good in expiation according 
to the temper of the god, no matter what the motive, 
or the meaning, in which they are offered. The 
christian sacrifice of propitiation, we are told, is of- 
fered, or set forth, " to declare the righteousness of 
God," and to gain all such as will believe in it to a new 
life quickened in righteousness. In the expiations of 
the heathen peoples the main thing is to have enough 
suffered, for the apprehended wrath will be stayed 
when the rages of the gods are glutted. No new 



84: FORGIVENESS 

relationship in character is expected, no ingenerated 
righteousness in the life, the distinctive idea being 
that the gocl offended is to have an evil given him by 
consent, for an evil due by retribution, or feared from 
his tokens of exasperation. It throws in before God, 
or the gods, some deprecating evil, in the expectation 
that the wrath may be satisfied by its compensation. 
The power of the expiation depends not on the sen- 
timents, or repentances, or pious intentions connected 
with it, but entirely on the voluntary damage incur- 
red in it. According to the Latin idea, Diis violatis 
expiatio debetur — " when the gods are wronged, expia- 
tion is their due " — and the understanding is that, 
when the wrong-doers punish themselves in great 
losses, it buys off the wrath of the gods and turns 
them to the side of favor. 

The pagan religions were corruptions, plainly 
enough in this view, of the original, ante-Mosaic, 
cultus — superstitions of degenerate brood, such as 
guilt, and fear, and the spurious motherhood of 
ignorance, have it for their law to propagate. As 
repentance settles into penance under this regimen of 
superstition, so the sacrifices settled into expiations 
under the same. And the process only went a little 
farther, when they fell, as they did the pagan world 
over, into the practice of human sacrifices ; for since 
the gods were to be gained by expiatory evils, the 
greater the evil the more sure the favor ; and there- 
fore they sometimes offered their captives, sometimes 
their sons and daughters, counting it possible in no 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 85 

other manner, to sufficiently placate their envious and 
bloody deities. Expiation figured in this manner, not 
as a merely casual and occasional part of religion, but 
as being very nearly the same thing as religion itself. 
For as Tacitus could say, that "the gods interfere 
in human concerns but to punish," what could men 
think of doing, in religion, but to expiate ? 

How low the pitch given to religion must be, under 
such rites, maintained for such pur- Expiation 
poses, may be seen from the fact that demoralizes, 
almost never, in the expiations offered as in depreca- 
tion of hostility and wrath on the part of the gods 
appealed to, is any least consideration had of their 
character. They are even thought to be unsaintly 
and base, actuated by jealousy of other gods, working 
in revenge, and lust, and deceit. As to their justice, 
nobody thinks of it, and the question never is, how to 
make good before them any fault of crime or personal 
misconduct. The expiation has commonly no fairer 
chance because it makes suit to the virtue of the 
god ; on the contrary, any most politic scheme to get 
the advance of an adversary, in coming at the cun- 
ning deity's favor, promises not only as well as a 
more timidly conscientious appeal, but even better. 
Every one, at all versed in the -classics, perfectly well 
knows that getting beforehand with the gods is 
the main thing in expiations. Their very smoke is 
the smoke of stratagem. The devotees and the gods 
are for the most part liars and cheats together. 
Nobody has any doubt of it, or conscience concerning 



86 FORGIVENESS 

it, and the integrity of the heathen world in general 
is just so far labefaet, prostitute, and morally rotted 
away, as it has religiously abounded in expiations. 
And yet how many christian teachers and disciples 
imagine that our gospel is to have its gain by follow- 
ing the classic expiations, and that the law and justice 
of God are to be rightly seconded by their example ! 
Are not classic authorities good ? And is not our 
religion finely complimented by them ? 

At the same time it is not to be denied that, draw- 
ing back from the field of the classics into the field of 
Scripture, it is possible there to hold a severer and 

Expiation as more nearly moral view of sacrifices, 
accepted evil. wn ioh s tiH classes them as expiations. 
Sin being a violation of the law of God, incurs, in 
that manner, a dread liability of pain or punishment, 
and sacrifices, it is conceived, make satisfaction to 
God for the offense and consequent bad liability, ob- 
taining, in that manner, a just release. Thus a third 
party, Christ himself, comes in to offer the suffer- 
ing of pain as an evil, which is accepted as being a 
good enough match for the evil that is due. In this 
manner, he makes amends for the sin by evil paid 
for evil due, and that is expiation. But the scheme, 
if not immoral, is fairly unmoral, as it ought to be 
under that word ; showing that God accepts the 
pains of the good in payment for the pains of the 
bad, and is more intent on getting his modicum of 
pains than he is on having proper justice done — tak- 
ing clean away the word and fact of forgiveness ; for 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 87 

if the debt of sin is paid, there is no longer any 
thing to forgive; substituting government _ also by a 
kind of proceeding that has no relation whatever to 
conscience and right. Happily there is not a single 
case of expiation in the whole christian scriptures, or 
any thing in the scripture sacrifices which bears a look 
that way, significant enough to support an argument. 
To verify this fact, I would go over a complete re- 
vision, if I had the time, as I did in my former 
treatise ; but I think it will suffice just to recapitulate 
the points which any one may establish by a very 
brief examination. 

Nothing is ever made in the sacrifices, as I have 
already observed, of the pains of the animal. The 
occasion itself is very generally regarded as a festive 
occasion, and the sacrifices are called No instances in 
" sacrifices of joy." And it is a very the Scn P ture - 
singular fact to be historically accounted for, that two 
of our most merrily jocund words in English are lineal 
descendants of the same stock with the altar word 
hilasJcomai, and related of course in meaning. I 
speak of the words hilarity and exhilaration; which 
if they somewhat overdo the gladness and eman- 
cipative grace of propitiation, very plainly never felt 
the touch of pains and penalties, so greatly magnified 
in expiation. Abraham was put through a trial of 
sacrifice ; or rather was not put through, but stopped 
short in the midst of it, to learn that a sheep is 
better than a man for the offering ; with a deliberate 
view, no doubt, to his being set up in his family, for 



00 ■ FORGIVENESS 

all future time, as a bulwark agaiust the unnatural 
and monstrous practice of human sacrifice, which was 
getting to be the distinctive practice of his time. 
There is no trace of expiation in the passover-rite ; 
which, considering that it is the original of the Lord's 
Supper, makes it the more remarkable ; since plainly 
there is some reference in the supper to pains en- 
dured, though endured, as the apostle teaches, not for 
pay but for propitiation. 

Expiations never occur on occasions where we most 
naturally look for them ; as in the judgment of Korah 
where there is an outbreak of mutiny and riotous 
tumult, and where, as we half naturally judge, a con- 
siderable smart of expiation might cool the rage 
of their fever. By and by, in the progress of 
the story, it begins to look as if the sacrifices were 
outgrown, and the human sacrifices of the heathen 
are sharply rebuked ; " To what purpose is the multi- 
tude of your sacrifices ? Bring no more vain obla- 
tions. Wash you, make you clean." So speaks the 
great preacher Isaiah, and Micah follows in a strain 
equally pungent — "Will the Lord be pleased with 
thousands of rams, or with tens of thousands of rivers 
of oil ? Shall I give my first born for my transgres- 
sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? 
What doth the Lord require of thee, O man, but to do 
justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God ?" Once more, we discover that a certain 
day is appointed to be observed, every year, by the 
people, which is to be the specially serious day of 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 89 

their calendar. It is to be a day of abstinence and 
deep tlionglitfulness, in which the whole nation, con- 
sidered as being unclean in every faculty and sense — in 
their houses, their worship, their priesthood, and their 
very altars — is to undergo a complete lustration and 
come forth clean. " On that day shall the priest make 
atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be 
clean from all your sins before the Lord."* The atone- 
ment, it will be observed, is lustral and not expiatory 
— " an atonement for you to cleanse you." This re- 
ligious day is generally called, especially by the Jews, 
their great clay of expiation, though never as holding 
the term in any closely defined meaning. The day is 
deeply serious and very impressive, but there is really 
nothing in it that has any least appearance of penal- 
ity, or of evil suffered to make amends for evil done. 

In this sketch I think it will sufficiently appear 
that expiatory suffering is not a scripture idea. To 
further extend the argument is unnecessary. It was 
clear enough in the beginning, that one or the other, 
propitiation or expiation, must go down; the two 
being morally incompatible. Which of the two 
it must be, I think we now have no room left for 
doubt. If the moral pitch of our gospel is low 
enough to be satisfied with a bought salvation, quan- 
titatively suffered for, and paid up as in expiation, it 
certainly can not rise high enough to even think a 
salvation unbought, yet distilled in that great alembic 
of cost-making love wherein God prepares the recon- 

* Com. Lev. xvi. 



90 FORGIVENESS 

ciliation of his enemies. If, on the contrary, it is 
in a pitch of character high enough to conceive the 
transcendent movements of propitiation, it most as- 
suredly can never sink low enough to count it a sal- 
vation that pains are simply bought off by pains, in 
the close exchange of expiation. 

I make this explicit renouncement of expiation with 
less satisfaction, that so many disciples appear to be 
under a partly superstitious impression of its immense 
practical value. They look upon it as the cen- 
tral truth about which genuinely .christian experience 
must revolve. They conceive a certain mysterious 
fitness in it to the needs of the conscience, alleging 
that the conscience is no casuist, deals in no refine- 
No interest of ments, questions never about the deli- 
character in ex- cate distinctions, never waits to have 
piation. t | ie g 0S p e i sm ooth itself out in the 

psychologic proprieties; wanting, therefore, never 
any thing so much as a good square paying in of 
pains for pains, penalties suffered for penalties de- 
served. Let there be no winnowing out of substance 
and power by our explanations. Let the emancipa- 
tion be as under the Roman law, when a slave is made 
free by a blow on his head. No matter if ques- 
tions rise and doubts remain, they come from the 
head ; let the head take care of them, and let the con- 
science be going its way sheltered by God's peace. 
Many teachers magnify expiation thus under an ap- 
peal of ignorance. They acknowledge that it does 



WITHOUT EXPIATION. 91 

not stand well in speculation, and that many reasons 
are lifted up in mutiny against it. Still it is tlie 
simple gospel they think, because it makes good the 
conscience ; for tlie conscience having no philosophy, 
can be pacified only by a way of settlement that 
transcends philosophy, and ignores all casuistries. It 
has, at any rate, they say, the necessary ring ; for 
which reason the strongest, most pronounced ideas 
•of expiation are necessary to the best effects in 
christian living. For self is thus cut off, and self- 
endeavor and all the legalities of duty. Speculation 
is given up ; for when expiation is taken for the re- 
ligion, there is no room for speculation left. And 
what shall we look for but to see the simple man be 
simply good and righteous ? for the reason that he is 
taken away from all doubting and even opinion. 

Now that such impressions are groundless I most 
confidently believe, and also think observation will 
show. Indeed, I will venture the assertion that 
the most intensely expiational form of Christianity, in- 
stead of being most robust and steadfast, is poor- 
est in the general, most unreliable, most frequently 
immoral. And that for the almost necessary reason, 
that it expects to have salvation by a coarse commer- 
cial transaction in the exchange of pains. Are not 
the punishments all made up ? is not the law quite 
satisfied ? What shall we do then but let go concern, 
ancL plunge ourselves in the unanalyzecl, unfiltered, 
waters of salvation? Why so delicate in making 
critically nice distinctions of things in our approach 



92 FOKGIVENESS, ETC. 

to God, when lie expiates our sins by the death of his 
Son, without caring to do it in a way that meets our 
dainty feelings and convictions. No ! it is an awful 
mistake, to speak in this coarse way of clearing the 
conscience. Such kind of uncaring peace will be 
only a dry-rot in the conscience, absolving it from 
duty instead of sin, and preparing the man to be re- 
ligiously and, as it were, devoutly irresponsible. 
Looseness and unthinkingness are themselves disorder 
begun, and will run to worse and worse disorder as 
they proceed. Let us know in whom we believe, 
what he has done, what his atoning is, how he could 
and did, and how he could not and did not, become 
our sacrifice. Let us count our salvation a matter 
high enough and rich enough to be studied, searched 
out, nicely discriminated. No faith in the gross, that 
makes a fetich of the cross, is going to stand proof. 
The disciple will become distinctly, nobly christian 
only when he takes the propitiation as it is offered, 
and lives by faith in it, as the tide-flow of God's free 
forgiveness. 



CHAPTER II. 



LAW AND COMMANDMENT. 



The forgiveness of sins, already considered in the 
chapter on Forgiveness and Propitiation, is a purely 
personal matter, in which the Fatherhood love and 
feeling and the offended holiness of God are concerned. 
The proceeding here is intelligible and simple, be- 
cause the forgiveness in question is to be a strictly 
Personal Settlement, that and that only. Then 
comes the farther question of the impersonal wrongs 
of law, and their Legal Settlement. The Legal 
All wrongs, taken as personal offenses, Settlement. 
are yet violations also of law, and forgiveness being 
personal has no power, of course, to right the injuries 
of broken law. The law, too, being impersonal can 
not of course forgive any thing itself; or any way 
compound its own wrong; neither is it conceivable 
that God, as the administrator of law, has any power 
to annul the fact of such wrong, or the fact of a dam- 
age done by it to the law. Forgiveness, we thus find, 
puts a man personally right with God, but it does not 
put him right with law, and it is not easy to see that 

any thing can. The retributive consequences of 

(93) 



94 LAW AND 

violated law arc running still in his nature ; only so 
far reduced as the moral disorders of his nature are 
rectified, and the blight of his transgressions removed 
by the health-restoring efficacy of the regeneration. 
Made partly or completely whole, he will be partly 
or completely clear of the penal effects of the law, 
never till then. At this single point and so far, for- 
giveness has to do with law, and law with forgiveness, 
and I really do not see that they have a single point 
of contact any where else ; except as the law con- 
tinues to press the enforcement of a life that can fitly 
be" forgiven. 

And yet we appear to be assuming always, in this 
matter of atonement, that a principal concern of the 
salvation is to mend up, or somehow rehabilitate the 
law, when the indulgences of forgiveness are allowed ; 
and especially to find how the standing offer of for- 
giveness can be proclaimed without consequent dam- 
age to its integrity. We assume, as if any thing 
could satisfy a law but simply and eternally to keep 
it, that the law broken by transgression must be satis- 

Satisfaction of fied. Not satisfied by obedience, it 
the law. must be by punishment ; not satisfied 
by the punishment of the wrong doer, it must be by 
the punishment of a substitute ; not by the punish- 
ment of a substitute in legal measure, it must be by 
some governmental equivalent in the expression of 
suffering, that will mend the public honor of the law 
and keep it good. Meantime, as regards this mat- 
ter of satisfying law, it is a very great question 



COMMANDMENT. 95 

whether enduring the penalty of transgression in full 
measure satisfies it ; for the felon who has served the 
time of his sentence completely out, is really no more 
approved by the law than he was before. He is not, 
in fact, approved at all and never can be till he 
makes a new character, and conquers to himself a 
new approbation. Still we go on con- inventions and 
triving theologic ways of satisfying devices. 
God's law, till, by one or another mode of getting its 
penalties made up, we think it is done. We propose 
substitutions for penalty, and compensations for pen- 
alty, and transferable merits provided, and righteous- 
nesses made up to even accounts, and sins carried over 
by transfer to another, and sins accepted for the sin- 
ner in the liabilities of his guilt, with justice executed 
upon the guilt thus responsibly taken. Using these for 
theologic counters, we go on working out computations 
of atonement, and showing how it is that Christ is 
able to unlock the gates of law and bring transgressors 
through, without damage to its integrity. To any 
christian believer the story ought to be a very sad 
one ; for the schemes built on these vocables are, of 
course, not more genuine than they. I will not charge 
that they are an altogether spurious brood, but the 
artificial look they carry is conspicuous. And their 
look is the more suspicious that they take on 
scripture semblances without any scripture mean- 
ings — save as we distinguish dimly the inverted 
images a great way off. Their intellectual figure, too, 
is a dismal sign for their supposed affinity with the 



96 LAW AN I) 

gospel ; for they do not present a possible idea, but 
always instead an impossible. On the whole, there 
is an aspect of discouragement really forbidding 
in all these endeavors, turning on the satisfaction 
of law or the satisfaction of penalty. We all the 
while suspect some juggle of theologic art in the 
processes themselves. As if the law were to be some- 
how gotten out of the way, without fulfillment — con- 
trary to Christ's own word when he declares, in 
solemn protestation to the world, that he is not come 
to destroy the law but to fulfill it. " For verily I say 
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one 
tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be 
fulfilled."* In the verse previous it is literally to 
"fulfill" but here it is, " be come to pass " — as if some 
thought of futurition were in mind, and as if he felt 
himself ordained to help on the law, and see it bring 
its crowning ideas to pass. A very different matter 
from that satisfying of the law which shows a process 
provided, by the counsel of heaven, for getting its 
penalties out of the innocent instead of the guilty ! 
The true Legal Fulfillment, which is the present ob- 
ject of our inquiry, is certainly not here. It will 
begin, as to its ruling idea, where Legal Obedience 
begins ; that is in keeping and fulfilling the law ; for 
the law, as we shall see, does not drop us the moment 
we transgress, but it comes on after us, like a faithful 
schoolmaster, joining its discipline with the grace 
of the cross and the grace of the Spirit, as 

* Matthew v, 17-18, 



COMMANDMENT. 97 

truly concerned as they to gather us back into 
liberty. 

I can not undertake, at this point, to state, in a 
formal way, the doctrine I am going to advance, 
for that is not yet possible. I shall be obliged, 
instead, to throw myself on the patience of my 
readers, and ask them to go along with me, stage 
by stage, till I have opened the subject far enough 
to make it possible. I will then set forth a gen- 
eral proposition that will cover the w r hole ground 
of the chapter. 

I. 

I know not any better point where to open the 
proposed discussion, than where, at a Beo . in at Christ 
certain favoring hour, it seemed to be and his com- 
first opened to me. Were it not a fact raandments - 
so thoroughly sealed by our dull repetitions, I think 
it would certainly be most remarkable, that the man 
Jesus — call him divine, or simply human, for out- 
wardly, at least, he is but a man — should so often and 
boldly insist on " the keeping of his commandments," 
as the standard test of his disciples. The wonder is 
too, that he does it so much as a matter of course ! 
And what shall we say of it? — that this humble, 
uneducated man, this peasant going as a foot passen- 
ger through the world, this wise man who is not a 
philosopher, this king without royalty or family, whom 
nobody has chosen, and whom fortune has not put in 
a condition to secure him shelter for his head, whose 



98 LAW AND 

mission is to suffer, and who only proposes to draw 
adherents by the yielding up of his life ; that he, a 
Who is he, to man so lowly and gentle, should put it 
command the on mankind to " keep his command- 
ments" — is it not a fact most remarka- 
ble in itself, and one that may fitly arrest our atten- 
tion? Plainly it is either a good deal more, or a great 
deal less than what we make of it. And have we no 
reason to suspect that we are losing immensely in our 
outfit of Christian ideas, by the very great inade- 
quacy of our teaching at this point ? Perhaps we miss 
any fit impression of it, by referring the Saviour's 
injunction mentally to his deific nature, counting it 
only a matter of course that he should sometimes 
speak out of his deific consciousness? And we have 
a way of doing this so often, to magnify his conde- 
scensions and the winning tenderness of his self-sacri- 
ficing devotion, that we scarcely leave him any thing 
at all, but in deific right. We call him Master, 
indeed, as a man, but when he comes to put his 
Masterhood on us, requiring us to keep his com- 
mandments, we do not quite imagine that he does it 
simply as a man ; he is only bidding us acknowledge 
his superior right and take the good injunction he is 
able to give, in the certainly deific authority by which 
he gives it. !N"o, he speaks as the man that came down 
from heaven ; and there is no great master of philos- 
ophy that ever undertook such authority, or that men 
would ever acknowledge for one moment in doing it. 
^Neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor Bacon, nor Kant, 



COMMANDMENT. 99 

ever thought of putting his commandment on the 
world, or of bringing his followers, in the test of their 
character, to the keeping of his commandments. But 
Jesus does it with no token of misgiving. And he 
does it evidently in the emphasis expected to be felt 
and the impression to be made, by his own transcend- 
ent personality. He glows, he beams, he rises in 
stature and becomes a half transfigured form, by the 
lifted consciousness he is in. That we are going to 
understand him in these commandments as simply 
putting us on keeping God's requirements, he plainly 
does not even imagine. 

Our attention then is here called to the Command- 
ments Christ will have us keep as our standard, and 
to the Law of God before enacted to be our standard ; 
especially to what they are in their General state- 
mutual relations to each other. And it ment - 
may serve to make our way more intelligible, if we 
set up beforehand the point on which we shall be 
moving ; viz., that what is called the law is to be con- 
summated, brought to pass, fulfilled, in Christ's com- 
mandments. The law, by itself, makes nothing in us 
answer to its own high intentions, and is never expect- 
ed, simply as law, to become a footing of salvation. 
But it is to make a beginning of moral impression, or 
enforced obligation, afterwards to be consummated 
in the state of allegiance to Christ, and the keeping 
of his commandments ; where the old enforcements 
are substituted largely by a service in liberty ; where, 
in fact, a new character is born, answering both to the 



100 LAW AND 

law and the commandments by which the law was to 
be fulfilled. It is not to be said that the law is satis- 
fied as being accurately kept — the satisfaction idea has 
no place here, unless it be understood as being satis- 
fied in that it comes at last to be fulfilled. This brief 
statement will suffice to indicate beforehand the doc- 
trine I am going to undertake, and it will be more 
fully and explicitly discovered, in the future progress 
of my argument. 

The two words law and commandment — nomos and 
entole — will settle into place most easily in our expo- 
sition, if we consider them ; I., Separately, in what 
they signify apart from each other; II., In their 
offices and uses ; and then ; III., In their mutual re- 
lations to each other. Only I desire at this early 
stage of the inquiry to place it as distinctly as possi- 
ble before the observation of my reader that I do not 
represent, and do not in fact believe that the two 
words nomos and entole uniformly hold in the scripture 
the precise relative significance given them in the ex- 
position that follows. They vary, sometimes one fall- 
ing very nearly into the sense of the other, so that 
discrimination is lost. And sometimes they even 
seem to cross over and make an exchange of meaning. 
Still a very close insertion of the critical knife will 
generally uncover some aspect of reason for the 
fluctuations discovered. But it must be enough for 
my present purpose, as I think it will be allowed, that 
the two words commonly and almost always in the 
New Testament, stand in the relative significance I 



COMMANDMENT. 101 

have given them. And this will be the more readily 
conceded, that I do not use them so much for authority 
as for convenience; though I do most certainly dis- 
cover in them just the complexions of meaning that 
make them convenient for my uses. I think also it 
will be agreed that I subject them to no violence. 
We proceed then to inquire — 

I. "What the two terms signify taken separately. 
In what is called the law, we have, at the foundation, 
that great distinction of our moral nature, which 
makes us moral beings by a property inherent ; viz., 
the eternal, absolute, self-asserting idea of right ; that 
which is the law before government, and a law to 
God in composing his government, as truly as to us, 
after it is composed ; that in which we become a law 
to ourselves, showing the work of the law written on 
our hearts. And then we have superadded to this, 
for its more specific application, or carrying out into 
practice, statutes instituted by God in a way of pos- 
itive enactment, appointing what we are to do, or not 
to do, for the due fulfillment of the aforesaid absolute, 
all-inclusive law. These positive word-statutes are 
also themselves enlarged and farther expoimded, in 
turn, by the moral legislations of the Scripture, and 
by the common law of society ; that is by custom, by 
legal definition, by refinements of aesthetic percep- 
tion, as well as by the drill practice of all the func- 
tional experiences. By these two concurrent methods, 
divine legislation and the custom of society, we ob- 
tain a moral code more or less complete; that, for 

9* 



102 LAW AND 

example, of the ten commandments, and that which 
is ethically developed about them and separately from 
them. And then, besides, we have additions in the 
Mosaic code, of liturgical law not moral, by which 
observances are enjoined that are designed to help the 
religious worship of the age then present, and to pre- 
pare a language of sacrifice for the future uses of the 
great salvation afterwards to be completed in the 
sacrifice of Christ — a kind of forecasting and pro- 
visional legislation, whose uses, over and above the 
present uses of the altar worship, could not appear for 
a long time to come, but when they should arrive 
would be " fulfillments " properly so called. Proba- 
bly this word " fulfill " was used by the Saviour in 
mental reference, partly, to the futuritions of the law 
in this liturgical department. 

In this description then we have the law [the nomos]; 
a rigidly impersonal, abstract, statutory code of con- 
duct, based in the everlasting, inherent, moral im- 
perative, that underlies it, and gives authority both 
to the Supreme Legislator and his legislations. It is 
the law before government, and then by government ; 
enforced by sanctions self-pronounced, and then by 
sanctions also that are legally prescribed. On the 
whole we shall probably understand what the law is, 
most comprehensively and most exactly, if we take 
the Saviour's own summation of it ; for this, it will 
be seen, covers in fact all we have said both of its 
absolute right and its practical necessity. " Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and 



COMMANDMENT. 103 

with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with 
all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." For if 
we call this God's consummate act of legislation, it 
still was law, absolute, in a sense, before all legis- 
lation. 

Let us next consider what is meant by the com- 
mandment, [entole], that which Christ The command- 
understands when he enjoins the keep- ment 
ing of his commandments, and gives to be the test 
henceforth of true discipleship. Any one can see 
that the word commandment is generally a less statu- 
tory, less tabulated, and more flexibly personal, word 
than the word law. As used by Christ, it commands 
in the sense of enjoining, and enjoins in the sense of 
a personal authority, and assumes to be a personal 
authority, by reason of the qualities embodied, and 
offices performed, in his ministry. It covers just all 
that is commended to man's feeling and conscience by 
his life and death. Sometimes he uses the term 
" words " as the synonym of " commandments," re- 
quiring us to keep his words and have them abiding 
in us. On a certain occasion he sums up all his 
claims of homage and obedience under the word 
yoke — " Take my yoke upon you and learn of me." 
The yoke is a symbol even of brute subjection, and 
is applied for that reason to nations going under cap- 
tivity. But he softens the term by his most tender 
;! durances — "for lam meek and lowly in heart, and 
ye shall hud rest to your souls."* That is, "coming 

* Matthew xi, 28-30. 



104 LAW AND 

under me and my commandments, and learning of 
me, ye shall no longer be galled as by living only 
nnder law, but ye shall be filled with all comfort and 
entered into liberty and rest." His meaning is the 
same when he calls himself " the way :" for the com- 
mandment is no assertion of authority simply, like 
the law, but a gently guiding power for the trust of 
erring souls. Again, it is another conception of his 
commandment that he is in the world as a person to 
be followed; a person who types all goodness and 
draws all loving homages into his own likeness. He 
does not say in the imperative, as the law does, " fol- 
low or die," but he says, " whosoever doth not follow, 
forsaking all to do it, can not, as in liberty, be my 
disciple." Sometimes he emphasizes his command- 
ment, and draws it to a closer point of homage, by 
insisting on that completeness of sacrifice which takes 
up even the cross to be with him. " He that loveth 
father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, 
and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is 
not worthy of me ; and he that taketh not his cross 
and followeth after me is not worthy of me." He 
asserts himself in like manner before Pilate as the 
king of truth and so the commander of the world, 
saying, " every one that is of the truth heareth my 
voice." 

He does not mean by his commandment then, or 

The command- the keeping of his commandments, 

ment unlegal. t ] iat ] ie [ 8 here to put us under syllables 

and the statutory dictations of law, such as by their 



COMMANDMENT. 105 

exactness and thunderous majesty, made even Moses 
" exceedingly fear and quake," but he is here as per- 
sonal commandment, to impress what a person may, 
and be what a person can, of supreme light and all- 
transforming benignity. So that what he insists 
upon, in the keeping of his commandments, does 
not mean a cringing and timorous observance, a bond- 
age of scruple and servile abasement, but a keeping 
in dear homages that count their object precious — 
even as a miser keeps his money, or the mother keeps 
her child, or a patriot his country. How very dif- 
ferent a matter is that grudging, slavish way of keep- 
ing the commandments, that is contriving always how 
to pass the test, by being exactly up and even with 
them. The true keeping is different, that of a body 
guard, that which is free as love is, not that which is 
in bonds looking after the jot and tittle because it 
must. It is the noble form of duty, which thinks not 
of what is to be feared, but of what is treasure to be 
lovingly guarded. And it is here, at this point, that 
the Saviour's test displays the consummate worth and 
glory of a character, in him, complete. 

I ought, perhaps, in so many specifications of what 
is meant by the commandment, to name the equiva- 
lent Paul gives for it, and so lovingly commends 
as if it were a kind of gospel way before the gospel, 

viz., the dispensation called Promise ;* 

, . , . . , The Promise. 

that which came to Abraham to be 
taken hold of by his faith ; that which the law, 
* Gal. iii. 14-19. 



106 LAW AND 

coming four hundred years after, could not annul, or 
make of none effect ; that which went with all good 
men before the law, according to their faith, and was 
their commandment, unpronounced but inwardly felt, 
even down to the incarnate appearing. And then 
Christ himself, in his commandment, undertakes to 
keep good the liberty of the promise, and guide his 
people on by inspirations from his own manifested 
love and sacrifice. 

And yet I must not omit to cite a still better ex- 
position by a still higher authority ; that is, by Christ 

~. . ■ himself. In one of his farewell dis- 

Chnst ex- 
pounds the com- courses, reported by John,* he dwells 
mandmeuts him- at j ar g e on t h e su bject, using, within a 
very few verses, the terms command, 
commandment, and commandments. He begins by 
comparing their keeping of his commandments with 
his own keeping of the Father's, the result of which 
will be that they abide in his love even as he in the 
Father's. Of course he does not mean that in the 
Father's commandments he is under any legal rela- 
tion, or any bonds of penalty ; such an- idea would be 
altogether abhorrent. As little does he mean the 
like, when he puts them to the keeping of his own. 
The state effected will be in both cases the same, an 
abiding in love — he in the Father's, they in his. He 
goes on further to say that he looks to the relation 
that will be established, as a relation of simple friend- 
ship, in which they will be governed by no dictation, 

* John xv, 10-15. 



COMMANDMENT. 107 

but simply as a friend governs a friend. Ye are my 
friends if ye do whatsoever I command you. Hence- 
forth I call you not servants, as I may have some- 
times seemed to do before — ye are not my bondmen, 
nor my hirelings, nor my servitors or domestics — but 
I have called you friends, intending therein to signify 
a state of dearest privity, in which you are let into 
my sympathies, and ends, and counsels, far enough 
to be able to command yourselves — even as Christ 
was in the counsel of the Father without any stat- 
utory direction. How sublime and blessed the rela- 
tionship ! 

II. The offices and uses of the law and the com- 
mandment. And here we shall see, at a glance, that 
the law, by itself, is not expected or intended to result 
in any complete form of personal vir- Offices and 
tue or character, It is to make a be- uses - 

ginning in the level of constrained motive, using in- 
timidations for the enforcement of principles, ham- 
mering in thus, or grinding in as it were, certain first 
impressions and first obligations necessary to charac- 
ter, as being its previous conditions. More exactly 
still it has for its office, to unfold the moral sense, and 
break the confidence of guilt, by revealing the dan- 
gers of disobedience. It ordains no fruitional, but a 
frictional experience rather, such as puts the subject 
writhing in condemnations, and conscious bondages, 
and apprehensions of evil to come. Accepted for its 
excellence, it would be life, and this it was designed 



108 LAW AND 

to be, if only it could, but though it is ordained for 
life, it is found to be unto death. But the death is 
to be, in fact, a main element of its value. For the 
subject, slain by the law, is yet in a training under 
it that is a highway opening into life. In one view 
it exasperates all the dispositions, working thus dis- 
order, discord, discouragement, and even a kind of 
disability, which still it is hoped may turn to benefit 
by the complete self-forsaking it prepares. Consid- 
ered as ordained before transgression it is right, be- 
cause it asserts a claim to homage that puts the soul, 
when accepted, on the footing of society with God, 
and blessedness in his favor. And yet, considering 
the inexperience and crudity of that state, it could 
not be expected to issue in any such way, save as it 
issued first in a state of downfall and moral disaster, 
to be afterwards mended by a recovery. "If there 
had been a law given which could have given life," 
says Paul, intimating his conviction of the impossi- 
bility; but it could have a real and powerful use, he 
thinks, when " added because of transgressions," that 
is to unfold the consciousness of transgression after 
the fact, and put the malefactor sighing for deliv- 
erance. 

So far the law has no value save as a first stage of 
discipline, to be followed by another that will bring 
on the discipline to a result that is complete. It is, 
and is declared to be " the ministration of death," 
" the letter that killeth," and it is only " the minis- 
tration of righteousness," " the spirit that giveth life," 



COMMANDMENT. 109 

that can make it better than a simply disastrous 
appointment. 

What we call the law of God then, and what the 
theologians have been magnifying with so great 
homage and almost idolatry, is not, after all, as we 
here discover, a perfect institute in The law no per- 
itself, and was never meant to be. It fect institute. 
has one inevitable, necessary imperfection, open to 
all discovery. (1.) That it proposes to work only by 
penal enforcements, making their appeal to self-inter- 
ested motive and that only, and holding every sub- 
ject, as far as it goes, fast down upon self-considera- 
tion ; so that acting by itself alone it will never bring 
the subject on to a way of duty freely chosen for its 
own sake. (2.) That it works for the most part, and 
must, by negative statutes that forbid, and not by 
positive that command. Thus, taking The law is 
for example the ten commandments, we negative mostly. 
find them just where all low-grounded evil minds are 
wont to pitch their moralities ; saying, " thou shalt 
not," " thou shalt not," in their every article save 
the fifth. There was, of course, no training into 
life, under these mere negatives. If they were able 
to keep the low-bred sinners of Israel back from 
being as bad as they otherwise might be, and level 
them up to a condition of society politically tolerable, 
it was all that could be expected, though here and 
there some one, taken by the Spirit, might be carried 
by, into something higher. If they undertook to 

keep the whole table of statute, in a way of puncti- 

10 



110 LAW AND 

lious observance, it would only make them legalists, 
and chain them down to that mere statute-keeping 
kind of virtue. The precise difficulty we have here 
with the law is, in fact, that it was only as good and 
high as it could be ; for the people of that first age 
could not even take the sense of any thing above 
their mental range. Thus Ezekiel, the prophet, tells 
the people expressly that " God gave them statutes 
not good,"* or the best, probably because they 
were too low in their perceptions to be commanded 
by any thing better. (3.) It is another large sub- 
No great in- traction from the nomos or the statute- 
spiration. mode of impersonal, tabulated rule, 
that it brings no inspirations, and yokes the subject 
to God by no faith climbing into the sense of his 
friendship. If there were no God back of the law, 
the case would not be different, save that his idea, 
coming in by way of authority, adds more stringency 
to the rules enforced. What then is more forlorn to 
think of, than that such a creature as man, made to 
be filled with deific inspirations, and wafted onward 
in the everlasting liberties of the righteousness of 
God, is shut down thus under a law-state which pro- 
vides no stimulations, or visitations of life, more 
ennobling than mere authority and fear ? I say these 
things, observe, in no way of complaint. The law is 
just as good as it can be, doing just all for the sub- 
ject in the way of legal benefit that it can. There 
is no possible repair of the deficit, but the bringing 
* Ezekiel xi, -5. 



COMMANDMENT. Ill 

in of a better hope. (±.) A mere law regimen is of 
necessity in scant measure, holding the principal 
ideas of love and right in a short way stunted by 

that does not measure them by God's want of percep- 
measures, but by the measures of nat- lon ' 
ural thought in men and the natural standards of 
society. God's intentions in the law are scanted, of 
course, by no such measures, but the moral ideas of 
men will be, till they are taken up out of the law and 
above it, by the second stage of discipline to be pro- 
vided in the commandment. 

Passing onward now to this second stage, we have 
it as our next point to consider the offices and 

offices and uses of the commandment uses of the com- 
Christ is giving us to keep as our new mandment - 
standard. And here we are to notice, first, the en- 
larged spread of the standard. Under the terms 
love and righteousness Christ goes a full day's journey, 
so to speak, beyond the law as held in men's thoughts, 
opening a vast province of culture, where the evan- 
gelic riches and liberties are gloriously enlarged and 
widened in their flow. According to the merely 
human, or legally humanized notions, love means only 
love to our neighbor, on the footing of our fellow 
nature. The word of Christ goes farther — " But I 
say unto you love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray 
for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." 
The law of natural society is, love the lovely, and 



112 LAW AND 

the law of God conceived under that restriction 
amounts to scarcely more than a law of good society. 
But Christ proposes a nobler and more 
sovereign love — love the unlovely, the 
base, the wicked, the hateful, the disgustful — insti- 
tuting thus a new divine order of love in sacrifice, 
and cost, and patience. This is the love that goes 
under, and up through evil, and regenerates all it 
touches ; heaving, as it were, every mountain of in- 
cumbrance that sin has piled on the world. So again 
there is a righteousness in Christ's view 
that the Scribes and Pharisees had not 
under the law in their most superstitious observance 
of it, and scarcely better I fear is our half-commercial 
righteousness, where we assume that right means 
only what is fair, equitable, or just. To Christ 
there is no right or righteousness that does not go 
a long way farther. No mai; is in the right, or up to 
the right, who is not ready for sacrifice and the en- 
during of cost for the ill-deserving. And hence it is 
that our Great Master is pronounced, as it were, on 
discovery to the world — " Jesus Christ the righteous " 
— and the definite article is prefixed, to challenge for 
him his pre-eminent distinction. Hence, also, that 
other pronouncement not less remarkable, " faithful 
and righteous — [not just, but righteous] to forgive us 
our sins ;" as if God would not think himself com- 
pletely righteous in his Son, were there any utmost 
sacrifice and cost he could not undergo for the for- 
giveness of sins. 



COMMANDMENT. 113 

And what a chapter is opened for us here, in these 
words love and right, as they will henceforth be repre- 
sented in the life of Christ by commandment. How 
far on do they reach beyond the measures of the 
merely legal code. In this legal code we live, as 
it were, outside of God, under the statute, shrunken 
up, and shriveled by the stringency of mere penal 
enforcement. Here, in the commandment, we live 
inside, where we range in glorious enlargement by 
God's measures, and are no more scanted in love and 
right by the meager notions, whether of Pharisees or 
ethical professors. 

Secondly, there is, I think, sufficient distinctness in 
the fact to require some distinct notice of it, that 
we not only come abroad here into wider and more 
enriched ways of excellence, but that we have our 
discipline by a different and more Leaving the 
genial method. We leave the mere law - 

tabulated, impersonal, statutory way of rule, and pass 
out into a way of commandment that is personal, 
and is, in fact, the rounded, all-containing sway of 
personality itself. In simply being what it is, it is 
commandment, and word, and way, and yoke, made 
easy ; for it is the living and dying Christ in whom all 
the authorities and captivating majesties of good are 
contained. The intimidations are gone by, at least 
for the time. The word is a word of Christly inspir- 
ation — take my yoke, take up my cross, walk in my 
way, as I live, live with me, as I die, be joined to me 
in death. Our life code is given in the person of 



114 LAW AND 

Jesus, and in that living book gets . authority to be 
our commandment. And it is a way of command- 
ment that leaves us free, nay that makes us free. 
Legal obedience is gone by forever. Impulse, in- 
spiration, duties that are meat and drink — these are 
the tide sweep of the new life quickened in us. The 
Son makes us free, and therefore we are free indeed. 
The Spirit goes with the word and commandment, as 
it does not with the law, wafting us onward, and 
where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. Kay 
the law itself, if we use that word, being in us no 
more by enforcement, is become the perfect law of 
liberty. And so the result is that when we are 
engaged to keep the commandment of Jesus, we have 
it keeping us, floating us on, tiding us in upon the 
divine fullness where we rest. 

There is yet. a third consideration that must not be 
Obedience by omitted ; viz., that the commandment 
faith. differs from the law as being offered to 

faith. The law is apprehended, or expected to be, 
only as all statutes are ; that is by ocular inspection, 
audible pronouncement, and other like natural ways 
of cognition. But the Christ-law, or commandment, 
is given to faith, even as Christ himself is, for in fact 
it is himself in the scope of its ideas and resulting 
obligations. It has no penal sanctions whatever, but 
speaking directly to faith it offers promise, always 
promise, working thus by comforts, inspirations, 
openings upwards into God. In this way, making 
its appeal to faith, it enlarges, lifts, kindles with 



COMMANDMENT. 115 

energy such as belongs to the Mighty Great One 
whose commandment and way of life it has chosen. 
Full account is made in this way of the fact that faith 
is the summit faculty and upper sense of the mind ; 
that by which all greatest, highest, things enter into 
mortals. Looking in here from afar over the battle- 
ments into the eternal city, it is as if the word of faith 
had taken us up thither. We enter, as it were be- 
forehand, by a kind of anticipative apprehension, or 
visional beatitude. But the law could not begin at 
faith. What could it say addressing faith ? Even the 
God of the law must take the prudential footing 
in it, setting in authority by enforcements of fear, 
and causing sins to wince by their bondages and 
dreaded wages. Faith gets no chance till after 
another chapter is opened, where some new grace of 
life is given to be accepted, or offered to be believed 
in. The good God coming in mercy and sacrifice to 
save — he only signals to faith. But if the law were 
to say believe, setting up statutes for it in penalty, 
there would certainly be a very wide chasm between 
that kind of artillery and the believing required. 

III. We come now to the third and last point in 
our proposed explication ; viz., the re- The relations 
lation of the Law and the Command- of the two - 
ment to each other. They have a common ob- 
ject, there is to be no doubt of that ; viz., to 
establish right and finish up a truly ennobled 
character of deific righteousness hi mankind. But 
they never did it, or proposed to do it, by either, in 



116 LAW AND 

its own separate agency. In the first place, the law, 
it is agreed, makes no righteousness of its own. 
Indeed, it is even declared to be the letter that killeth 
— ordained unto life, but found to be unto death. I 
think too we can see beforehand, that any table of 
statute working by itself, and forcing on virtues by 
motives in the nature of retribution, must bring 
failure and precipitation; though even that may 
become the necessary footing of a new second-stage 
movement forward. Be it so, still they are both in 
line together, moving, each in its way, on the common 
interest of character. By one is the knowledge of 
sin, by the other the deliverance from it; and the 
knowledge being necessary to the deliverance, has a 
certain common value with it. We shall discover 
thus, as regards the relative action of the two great 
factors, law and commandment, that the law is just 
as necessary to the result as the commandment, and 
that the latter, taken by itself, can do as little as the 
law by itself. The expectation was, and is, that a be- 
ginning made under the latter and the legal intimida- 
tions, will stamp in such imprints of authority and 
obligation, and raise such storms of disorder and wild 
remorse within, when they are violated, that the sub- 
ject, driven out of all confidence in himself, will be 
casting about for almost any deliverance from the 
dreadful precipitation that is thrusting him down. 
"Whereupon it is the plan to bring him out and up 
by his faith in the commandment, or second stage 
of discipline, into a state of new-born life. So that, 



COMMANDMENT. 117 

between the two, and by one as truly as the other, the 
great final end of liberty and holy character will be 
consummated. If we say fulfilled, we mean the same 
thing ; for the law, when even already broken, is to be 
fulfilled in the commandment as truly and totally as 
if it had never been broken ; perhaps the more com- 
pletely fulfilled that, after the breach, exasperated 
longings, and heart-sinking bondages, and writhings 
of remorse, will have created a hell in the mind, that 
is to be the eternal possibility of juster apprehensions 
and vaster yearnings ; such as will be spanning 
forever the chasm that the breach has made. 

It needs also to be noted, as regards the two great 
factors, law and commandment, that ne a factor in 
one is a factor in nature and among nature, the other 
natural causes, and the other super- su P ernatural - 
natural. The apostle shows them working both 
together — the weakness of one and the relative 
might of the other. " For what the law could not 
do, in that it was weak through the flesh " — that is 
through the mere constitution-life in which both law 
and penalty are to get their pronouncement — " God 
sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful 
flesh, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous- 
ness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk 
not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Every 
tiling is weak on the footing of law, but every 
thing begun there triumphs in the supernatural 
vigor of the Spirit; for the commandment, as being 
spirit and truth, is supernatural vigor itself. Penal 



118 IMPOKTANT ANALOGIES 

causations are the power in the one, and it is a dreadful 
power ; supernatural ministrations, separating the 
guilty from their hidden poisons and their low-bred 
disabilities, are the power in the other. Natural 
causes, appointed to avenge the law, suffer no violence 
or displacement by the supernatural grace, but this 
latter visitation, quickening good in the man and the 
man to good, in a manner of silent sovereignty, makes 
the natural causes slacken their hold on him and let 
him forth made whole and free. 

The law, it is important to add, is in this view 
Law never never abolished or annulled by the com- 
abolished. mandment, though it is a common way 
of the evangelic teaching to very nearly say it. Some 
may think it is even said by the scripture ; as where 
it is declared, " For there is verily a disannulling of 
the commandment going before, for the weakness and 
unprofitableness thereof; for the law made nothing 
perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did."* 
But this is not said of the moral-law table, as will be 
seen at a glance by reference to the passage, but of 
the ceremonial law, and specially of the priesthood ; 
which was only a lighter and very subordinate part 
of the law, that was added, in fact, to be taken away. 
There is indeed a single passage, it must be allowed, 
where the law side of the double ministration we are 
discussing is spoken of as being done away — "For 
if that which is done away was glorious, much more 
that which remain eth is glorious. "f But the real fact 
*Heb. vii, 18-19. f 2 Cor. iii, 11. 



IN COMMON LIFE. 119 

here intended is, beyond a question, that the new free 
life of the commandment takes away the subject from 
the law, and not the law from the subject. Just as 
the same apostle says, " Ye are become dead to the 
law by the body of Christ."* He does not say for the 
law is become dead to you, but ye are become dead 
to the law. And yet in still another place he does 
even speak of the law itself as dead. " But now we 
are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein 
we were held, that we should serve in newness of 
spirit and not in the oldness of the letter, "f Yet 
even here he plainly enough does not mean that the 
law is abrogated and gone, in that sense dead, but only 
that, in practical living, we go over from the old to 
the new, and have our central homage there. Plainly 
enough the law of God never can be taken away 
from any world or creature ; for with it, in close com- 
pany, goes abroad all the conserving principle, moral 
and physical, in which God's kingdom stands. 

A thousand crosses, ransoms, atonements, would 
leave it -exactly where it was. The taking away of 
sin was possible, but no taking away of the law. 
The sacrifice of Calvary itself, set against the law, 
would have had as little effect on it as upon the 
principles of Euclid. Therefore we must never allow 
to be slid into our secret apprehension, back of 
thought, any most latent feeling that God is at work 
in his Son to mend, or mitigate, or get us by, the 
law. It is whole as it ever was. Broken oft, as in 

* Romans vii, 4. f Romans vii, 6: 



120 IMPORTANT ANALOGIES 

figure, it is yet not flawed ; condemning still and 
always every thing in principle it lias condemned ; 
certain to outlast the world, even as it lived before the 
world in the eternal bosom of God. 

II. 

This very specific and scriptural exposition of the 
two great factors, the commandment and the law, 
and their 'relative work and office, is a gathering up 
of material, it will be understood, for the great Legal 
What this ex- Settlement or Consummation which is 
position is for. j-| ie proposed subject of our inquiry. 
But we are not yet ready to use this material to the 
best advantage, and can not be till we have gone over 
another field not scriptural, and brought in the rich 
fund of matters there supplied for our help. Know- 
ing, as we all do, that God's way, in casting the 
molds of things, is to show us first what is natural, 
and afterwards what is spiritual, as it may be signified 
thereby ; to show us things in human life and. society 
set to represent, by analogic correspondences, things 
of the Spirit and things Celestial, making always the 
lower to be interpreters of the higher — men's forgive- 
nesses, of God's forgivenesses — the family, of God's 
great Fatherhood — the state, of God's infinite king- 
dom — knowing this, I say, it is the more remarkable 
that we miss observing the numerous analogies of law 
and gospel continually crowded upon us in our natural 
and earthly state. It can not be that these low-rang- 
ing, sub-atoning ways of discipline, all beginning 



IN COMMON LIFE. 121 

with law and meant to be issued in liberty, have no 
important lessons to give ns in the field of religion. 
Let me call attention to a few of the numerous ex- 
amples. 

I begin with the training of childhood, where the 
two factors, authority and love, penal Mother and 
constraint and a naturally vicarious ten- cblld - 
derness in the mother, work together, as the law and 
commandment, making up the compound discipline 
that is to establish the obedience of the child. She 
goes, to her charge thus, in the endeavor to make her 
child the man he should be. But the restive boy, just 
passing out of infancy, wonders that he must be so con- 
tinually hampered by restrictions. lie loses temper 
once an hour, stands looking doggedly down when 
commanded, and shakes off the hand that is kindly 
put upon him. A little farther on he debates every 
thing, grows irascible and stormy that he can not 
have his own way, when he knows so well himself 
exactly what he wants ! Which is the most vexatious, 
the doing required of him, or the doing forbidden him, 
it may be difficult to say ; enough that he is twisting all 
the while in one sort of annoyance or the other. Of 
course there is a difference of temperament in 
children, and a great many mothers are indiscreet in 
the over-multiplication of things forbidden. Still, 
where the administration is most considerate and 
most tenderly faithful, there will often be stormy 
scenes of impatience, and sometimes punishment 

will be unavoidable. Old enough to sympathize with 

11 



122 IMPORTANT ANALOGIES 

himself, and galled, as lie thinks, by real chains, his 
very sentiment becomes a pain ; is there no relief? 
But there comes along by and by, later than we 
should expect, and late enough to cost his mother 
hours of great anxiety, a stray thought in a different 
key. Perhaps it is suggested by what has been 
observed in some other family, where a comrade 
child is glad and bright in the sunshine of his 
mother's control. Now begins revision at the ques- 
tion, not unlikely, is my mother less good than his ? 
is her control less faithfully meant ? might I not as 
well be happy and sunny myself? And so the result 
is that the boy who, at eight years of age, was tearing 
himself against every point of maternal restriction, 
will finally, at thirty, obey every softest wish of his 
mother as if it were an edict, and will even catch it 
by anticipation before it is expressed. Probably 
the old struggles of his childhood, and the fight of 
impatience under his mother's law, are so far gone by 
now as scarcely to be remembered. And yet that 
rule stays by him still, deep down, central, silent, 
and commanding, as it were, in the very homages of 
his grown up sonship. The fears are gone out, the 
discipline is over, all the frictions by which she was 
rubbing in the moral of her authority, are spent, but 
her motherly right is even the more decisively as- 
serted now that it makes no self-assertion at all. 
This remarkable change is often noticed, and is gen- 
erally ascribed, I think, to the habit principle. But 
habit only fastens what has been the way of practice. 



IN COMMON LIFE. 123 

The man therefore ought to be only more doggedly 
set in his opposition to rule and authority, because of 
the impatience of his childhood. lie would be, if he 
had not somehow found his way out into the 
obedience of liberty. That transition clearly was not 
made by habit, but the habit he is now in, if we call 
it by that name, was rather begun itself at the tran- 
sition. ' The spontaneous homage he now pays to his 
mother is pure liberty, and has no legal quality 
whatever, save that her law is tacitly centered in him 
and he knows it not. 

From the family we pass to the school. The be- 
havior here is prescribed by rule, the The school 
hours and times are fixed, the lessons discipline. 
are appointed. Play meantime is held in embargo, 
and idleness put under spur. And the result is very 
commonly that the whole affair is distasteful — a 
bondage, a dreariness — and all the books, and pre- 
scribed lessons, a drug. And the very reason is that 
knowledge has now to be sought by law before it is 
wanted by appetite. Every thing goes on by statute, 
and of course drags heavily. And so it will be, till 
some grand mind-loving soul comes out in the Master, 
making study, Arnold- wise, of the boy, ta find what 
is in him and put him in his line of promise. 
The result is now that a fire is kindled and a new 
capacity is born. Ceasing to be a drudge, he now 
begins to hunger after knowledge itself, set on by 
devotion to study for its own sake, as he once could 
not think it possible to be. Sometimes this en- 



124 IMPORTANT ANALOGIES 

tliusiasm gets kindled very late. But after the fire 
once begins to blaze, there will not be hours 
enough in day and night together, to satisfy the 
appetite engaged. The school is now gone by, we 
say, the old day of fixed lessons and fixed hours, 
and compelled digging at the books — all the legal ways 
of the drill — are spent, and yet we shall come much 
nearer to the true conception, if we say they are all 
fulfilled substantially now in the self-prompted en- 
deavor and free play of liberty. Knowledge is now 
desired and study pursued for its own sake — just 
what the old law drill of the lessons was for, but 
could not bring to pass, till the inspirations came, and 
then the work was done. 

Turning in still another direction, we encounter 
Labor and the the institute of labor, organized from 
curse. the beginning by a law that undertakes 
the training of men correctively towards ways of 
industry, and reformatively out of ways of self- 
indulgence, which is the bane of all responsibility 
and character. There is no law more truly beneficent. 
We call it the law of the curse, and rightly, but it 
is none the less truly beneficent on that account. 
Muscular toil or labor is naturally irksome to men, 
and the sweat of the brow is no popular institution. 
All the worse when compelled by the grinding stress 
of necessity. Any law of work, driven home by that 
kind of enforcement, is justly called a curse. But 
cursed as the ground is, and cursed as the toil, it is 
yet a right good curse, as all workers discover, when 



IN COMMON LIFE. 125 

they find tlieir way on, through the compulsions of 
work, into the liberties. When the sense of skill is 
waked and the sense of creatorship, when a home is 
endowed and the acres in culture smile their glad 
acknowledgment, when children arrive and the little 
patrons of the cradle and the table look their bless- 
ing, the drudgery, that was, becomes a privilege, the 
industry, a song. The worker's greatest difficulty 
now is to set himself limits and take the needed 
rest. To him now there is no curse in labor. He 
scarcely sees, perhaps stoutly denies, the world- 
blight of transgression itself. It is even as if that 
world-blight law were taken clean away ; so grandly 
is it fulfilled and fulfilling, as regards the moral intent 
of it, in the joyous and free industries that are be- 
come the life of his life — drudgeries all in their law- 
state, now become the state of play. 

Again, we meet another strangely impressive ex- 
ample in the army discipline. It begins with a code 
of rides or camp orders, precise, in- The army 
flexible, unconditionally severe. The discipline. 
problem of the discipline is first of all to make the 
soldier impassive, and so the squadron, great or small, 
a machine. If the surgeon rates a man as well, he is 
well. He is loafing if he "is not on parade at the 
call, and must answer for it. If his eye is rolling 
about and not fixed, if he fumbles inattentively in 
his drill, or because of the numbness of his hands, if 
he makes easy times for one foot instead of standing 

square on both, let him be put in arrest. That 

11* 



126 IMPORTANT ANALOGIES 

homesick boy soldier who wept himself asleep on 
guard, last night, thinking of his mother, was tried 
this morning and is to be shot after breakfast 
to-morrow. Pitilessly hard this law of the camp. 
Perhaps there is no element of justice in it, but if 
not, there is at bottom a dread military necessity, 
and by and by the men themselves will discover it. 
They will have a commander, too, not unlikely, who 
is much applauded for his fine heroic bearing in some 
late battle, and will they not begin to be proud of 
him? Having too a great cause, and doing service 
with their life for a great country, they will talk their 
hearts into magnitude by the same, till the tide of 
sentiment, rising high in their talk, makes their flag 
a power in the beating of then" pulse. So that when 
the war heat finally is kindled, as it will be soon, 
nobody thinks any longer of the tough law discipline 
at which the soldier-life began ; for that was meant 
to kill out all the self-indulgences and private wills, 
and make clean sweep of all the crotchets and home- 
bred likings, that could not be taken by the military 
inspirations. And now when it is done, and the law- 
force of the beginning appears to be quite gone by, 
how conspicuous will it be that, in being seem- 
ingly forgot, it is being only more grandly fulfilled, 
than if it were felt in the still unwelcome stress of 
its intimidations. But nothing any longer goes by 
the old camp law ; for the men will now command 
themselves, or bid their leader command them, into 
rougher and more stringent services than the law 



IN COMMON LIFE 127 

itself could name. Imagine the forlorn liope call to 
"be now issued, and that volunteers are waited for; 
behold every man is ready to go for his company, 
and all insist on being taken. Why, the christian 
martyrs, going in before magistrates to confess Christ 
and die, are scarcely dishonored by comparison with 
these men who, to keep the commandment of their 
leader, march out into the jaws of death, and consent 
to be oifered with him for their country. The old 
precisional drill, that came so hard upon the soldier 
at first, it will now be seen is even impotent, in com- 
parison with the new army spirit by which it is su- 
perseded. Which new force can march the men 
through rivers up to their waist, and bring them out 
not knowing they are wet ; or can send them to sleep 
without rations, after a hard day's battle, not knowing 
they are hungry. They are in the cause ; and all such 
things are the concern of the cause, not theirs. True 
the old drill is still on hand, but the men know it 
only as a far-off underground matter that is well 
enough to be remembered, but no spring of action 
longer. 

We have yet one more example, viz., that which 
may be cited from the analogies of the The civil 
civil state. Here we strike an out- state - 

spreading argument that is wide as the world ; for 
the civil state comprehends all the nations, societies, 
and ages of humanity. In one view it is a condition 
based in the necessity of a supreme order, and is, 
therefore, written down by revelation itself as " the 



128 CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING 

ordinance of God ;" headed by a magistrate in God's 
name, who is authorized "to bear the sword," and not 
"bear it in vain." The liabilities of this enforced 
rule are some of them heavy, such as those for ex- 
ample of military duty and taxation, and the whole 
scheme of order, considered as maintained by penal 
sanctions, is naturally unpopular. Yet not as un- 
popular as we should think, and likely enough to 
be not unpopular at all. Thus we have always on 
hand, in these modern times, the question of liberty 
and law ; and a great many have not learned as yet 
what liberty is. They think it is exemption from 
law, and that having no law is the true way to be 
free. "Whereas the greatest liberty is where there is 
most law needing least enforcement ; where in fact 
the penalties are forgot, and well nigh the pre- 
cept too; so quietly does it sleep back of public 
memory. Who of us now, but the malefactors and 
felons wanting to be safe in crime, ever feel a straw's 
weight of severity in the law, or even think of it as 
law at all. It is light as air to us, and not less free. 
We altogether love the shelter of the magistracy, 
and have it as one of our chief cares to provide 
a magistracy for ourselves, going into their election 
with the greatest vehemence of endeavor, as for what 
we most intensely value. And then our homages 
will be to them, scarcely at all to the law. We 
think of them never as dynasties farming their people 
and the laws for their own benefit. We have not 
even a jealousy left of that old tyrant magistracy 



THESE ANALOGIES. 129 

once so oppressive. But we run our recollections 
back to such great chiefs of statesmanship as Wil- 
liam of Holland, and Cromwell, and Washington, 
and the minor lights closer at hand, who undertake 
to lead the people for their good. Such magistracy 
we love and trust, and forgetting the law we only 
think of liberty. 

Now by so many instances, which might be largely 
increased in number, I have undertaken to show how 
the grand analogy of letter and spirit, law and 
liberty, or law and free commandment, runs through 
all the organific discipline of life and society. Every 
thing goes on by this double ministration. By these 
two factors, one preparing the other, and the other, 
partly replacing and completely fulfilling the one, 
whatever is most perfect and consummately free in 
character and order, is brought to pass. In this 
scale of analogies we go up as it were by so many 
stairs, and make our landing finally, at that last 
rising where the sinners of mankind pass up out of 
their low dejection, put of their bondage under law, 
into liberty and justified life. 

I ought, perhaps, to just add, lest we imagine this 
kind of material to be now exhausted by the speci- 
fications made, that exactly the same analogy goes 
with every law of duty and morality. Every virtue 
begins at law, and is put lifting there, as a plant 
underground, till it finally breaks up through, flower- 
ing into liberty. Thus it is with temperate living, 



130 CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING 

frugality, simplicity of dress, truth of character, and 
with all the vices to be kept down — luxury, sensual- 
ity, show, covetousness, revenge and jealousy, popu- 
larity-loving and ambition, insincerity and hypoc- 
risy. A law goes with every common virtue, and 
against every corresponding vice, laying on heavy 
coercions of penal consequence in the first stages of 
experience, to be no more sensibly felt, after the 
virtue is set fast, and the spontaneous waft of duty is 
come. It is only not clear always, in these innumer- 
able varieties of ethical discipline, by what means or 
modes of transition, the spontaneous condition will be 
reached. Probably the means will be occasional 
and various. 

Having made this excursion among the analogical 
sub-gospels of our discipline, let us gather up now 
some of the helps and coincidences afforded, to assist 
our argument in the main question. We find then, 
first of all, a two-factor method, like that of law and 
grace, employed in almost every sort of training 
wanted for the advancement of our human state. A 
beginning is made with law T and legal enforcement, 
and an expectation had of bringing out the subject, by 
some more inspiring influence added, in a way of 
spontaneous obedience, which, forgetting the coercion, 
minds only the principle. A transition is to be made 
from principle enforced by statute, to principle beheld 
in its own attractions and accepted in love for its 
own sake. The good intended in the first stage is 
perfected in the second as a way of liberty ; where 



THESE ANALOGIES. 131 

the subjects are the more obedient because they are 
free, and the more free because they- are obedient. 

But again, the free state, when it is reached, makes 
no compensation to the law-state, and the law-state 
makes no demand of satisfaction for the penalties 
gone by or discontinued. Good sons, and scholars, 
and workers, and soldiers, and subjects, are at liberty 
to be good, without any complaint from the law they 
have broken, or any demand of compensation for 
the penal sanctions thrown out of right No compensa- 
by their becoming so. The wayward tion wanted - 
child of his mother, who is grown up into a dutiful 
manhood, has a long debtor-score stringing back over 
the lapse of years, but what the reckoning of so much 
wrong and deserved chastisement may be, neither 
she nor he can tell. And her law makes no demand 
of satisfaction ; neither has any body so much as a 
thought of damage to the maternal authority, requir- 
ing to be made good. In all these sub-gospel cases, 
the legal and coercive sanctions go by, as it were, 
because of their successes ; that is because their aims 
and uses are fulfilled, or come to pass. What better 
can law do, as a moral institute, any where, than to 
show itself a basis of freedom in the inspirations of 
duty. It is represented by the great general, who, 
having gained the saving of his country, is not gone 
out of honor and consequence, because he has not 
still his country to save. 

Once more, it is important to observe that, in these 
analogic cases and examples, the penal enforcements 



132 GENERAL STATEMENT 

appointed are never destructively meant. They are 
The penal never punitive, but only coercive and 
sanctions never corrective. They have it for their very 
simple office to give cogency to the law- 
force, and prepare that assent which makes room for 
the uncoercive, free-moving agencies, to finish out the 
duties in their inspirations. The two kinds of action 
are unlike in the last degree, and yet they are con- 
current ; one thrusting on from behind by coercive 
pushes of enforcement, and the other drawing, on by 
the fervid attractions of love and promise. Both 
together make up the score of so many kinds of dis- 
cipline, strong in their conjunction, weak or^even null 
in their single operation. Certain evils that we call 
retributive, such as the woes and horrible exaspera- 
tions of intemperate drink, do appear, it is true, to be 
too dreadfully overmastering in their dispossessing 
force, to be thought of as promotives in any sense of 
the virtues rejected. And yet we may very well 
ask, what else but such a cogency of warning can 
preventively tame the appetite for drink ? and what 
but such a hell in the mind afterward, can ever 
burn a way out of thrall into sobriety and reason ? 
However nearly destructive any such penal motive 
may seem, there is, after all, no reason to distrust the 
beneficence of it. For if any one suggests the possi- 
bility of a plan which exposes to no such appetite or 
danger, that is not God's way; he never lets go a 
virtue or excuses from it, because it will have to 
master a great peril, but considers rather that he gives 



FOR THE WHOLE SUBJECT. 133 

ns greater opportunity according to the greatness of 
the peril. And how cheap and slack the poor world's 
figure would be, going loose in a virtue that does 
not include the grand, self-keeping masterhood and 
majesty of continence. 

III. 
We pass over now to the main subject for which 
this excursion has been made ; viz., God's twofold 
way of training under his law, and the redemp- 
tive grace in his Son. The matter of The gospel way 
this training, as we now perceive, is not not P eculiar - 
so peculiar as to make it a case wholly by itself, but 
it holds a place, instead, at the head of a vast, wide- 
spread system of analogies that, in their lower grade, 
look up to be its interpreters. It is grounded 
partly, at least, in the same necessities and reasons, 
though moving in a scale so transcendent, as to 
scarcely allow the relationship of its humbler kinsmen 
to be observed. Here, in this higher discipline, we 
are asking always What of the law ? — in particular, 
what is to be apprehended for it in redemption? 
what losses will occur to its authority ? what com- 
pensations will be needed ? what satisfactions must 
be provided \ Where one thing, at least, is quite 
certain beforehand, which we may have our comfort 
in, carrying it on with us ; viz., that it is the law of 
God, and is not likely to go down, whatever we may 
say, or omit to say, or think, or omit to think, con- 



cerning it. 



12 



134 THE PENALLY COERCIVE 

That we may have our mark before us, and steady 
our thought by it, in the inquiries that remain, I now 
set forth in formal statement the following conclusion, 
which has been looming up more and more distinctly 

General state- upon us in all the previous approaches, 
ment. That our present state of life, or proba- 

tion, is a state of penally coercive discipline, in which the 
law, broken by sin, is sufficiently consecrated by Christ, 
incarnated into and co-operating with it, in his life 
and cross. 

Three points in this proposed summation require 
to be distinctly stated. 

I. The penally coercive discipline. It is not penal, 
of course, or penalty, in any such sense that it must 

The coercive be destruction, and can not be disci- 
disciplme. pline. In calling it discipline, I call 
it schooling ; for schooling is what we mean by disci- 
pline. Calling it our schoolmaster to bring us to 
Christ, we mean the same thing ; viz., that it is pro- 
motive, corrective, coercive, no matter what our 
deserts may be, or what penalties in the principle of 
desert they would bring us. I use the terms penally 
coercive discipline, in the understanding that our 
training toward God is carried on under a motivity 
thus named, which is not judicially penal, and is not 
meant to be ; for it is not graded by the desert of 
actioMS, but by what is wanted for the future benefit 
and due correction of the actors. I use the term 
penally coercive, because there is a law sanction in the 
discipline, coming back upon actions, in a certain 



DISCIPLINE DESCRIBED. 135 

way of retaliation or retributive consequence, with- 
out being a substantive measure of their ill-desert ; 
the object being not any making up of award, but 
the making us* aware of what we are doing and be- 
coming. It is the lesson we take in our schooling, to 
make us understand, stage by stage, ourselves and 
the law, and to be an efficient element in securing our 
obedience. 

"What is penal in our discipline would be penalty, 
if it were not discipline ; nay, it would be justice 
itself; *. e., justice in its nature, if not in its measure. 
For it is exactly what the laws of natural consequence 
inflict in the name of justice ; save that here, in this 
temporal and mortal discipline, they are confront- 
ed by a whole array of restraining, mitigating, 
interspacing powers — Christ, and the Holy Spirit, 
and the Word, and the Church, and an all-tempering 
Christly providence — converted in that manner into 
another sort of economy that, for the present, makes 
nothing of desert and every thing of benefit, and 
which, therefore, we call discipline, penally correct- 
ive discipline, because it is so far penal as will make 
it most corrective. 

Only it requires to be understood that, in being 
set for benefit and not for punishment, there is still, 
at times, an awful severity in it, and Greatness of the 
desolations wrought by it, that seem discipline. 
to even smoke with judgment. It clearly enough 
should be so ; for a penally corrective discipline sup- 
poses no delicate handling. How shall sin be re- 



136 THE PENALLY COERCIVE 

vealed to itself, save in forbidding and frightful 
pictures — in diseased bodies, in distempered thought, 
misadjusted mind, exasperated passion, by incapac- 
ities and bondages, anxieties, commotions, terrors 
of the air and of the ground. Sometimes the pic- 
ture will almost take on a look of destruction ; be- 
cause only what is close upon destruction has force 
enough to be decisive. The woes thus of our merely 
mental experience, sometimes bear an expression of 
such unpitying severity as compels us even to shudder, 
in allowing that God is represented in them. Still they 
are coercive only, and not penal, and it is not for us 
to say, hi any case, that they are more severe than 
they need be. 

By this , fearful stress of discipline, without judicial 
penalty, the due coercive power has been and is to be 
maintained. The law requires no properly judicial 
severities for its better enforcement. There is, indeed, 
a justice penalty, or state of penalty, provided for in 
God's causations, that is to come into range when 
the other world opens, but it has been held back here, 
just to make this a world of probation, as otherwise 
it could not be. There are here no awards of judg- 
ment to be taken out of the way, but the coercive 
side of the law, and the free grace side of the com- 
mandment, work on together, for the same result of 
benefit ; just as in the humbler analogies I have cited 
from our common life, the law side keeps its footing 
even after the liberty has come. Who has ever 
thought it necessary, in the school, to stop at some 



DISCIPLINE DESCRIBED. 137 

given point, and take away the coercive rule, to let 
the free application begin ? 

If now it he objected that we are already cast, or 
held in detention, by the bonds of penalty, which 
must be somehow taken off before we The tw . f actora 
are free to any thing good, that is a have no separate 
mode of speaking which supposes that W01 m8 ' 
the law has no function left since the fall but to kill ; 
and that, being once dead, there is nothing left for us 
but to stay by our death, till another dispensation, 
working also by itself, appears, to bring us life. But 
the two are not given to work separately in this man- 
ner, but to work together in composing a complex 
discipline — a coercive law power, to be borne up and 
consummated by a life-giving personal grace ; and a 
personal-grace power, to be made welcome and ef- 
ficient by the coercive and appalling arguments of 
the law. Otherwise, if the two have no joint office, 
the law has really no benign efficacy at all ; it has 
nothing to do, and never had, but to condemn and 
kill. We are bound, in just deference to God, to 
look for something different, and Ave have no right to 
be satisfied till we find some righteous moving of 
benefit in it. As we do, when we find it working 
even in the cross itself, and composing a discipline 
with it, for the training and exercise of character. 
True it is declared to be a killing or slaying power, 
but we must not hold the figure too literally. As a 
mere legal discipline, taken by itself, it would do this 

and this only. It was never meant to be thus taken, 

12* 



138 NO ISSUE FOR JUSTICE 

but to be a factor of coercion, -working with the free- 
grace factor in Christ, and that in turn a factor with 
it, both composing the divinely beneficent whole of 
discipline together. And if any one may insist on 
seeing what place it has for killing in such a work of 
benefit, it must be enough to say that, while it com- 
mands for good and good only, its command rejected 
will be found to be unto death — which is only so far 
death as will make it a more convincing and cogent 
argument in the discipline. So as long as the dis- 
obedience continues, it will be piling greater condem- 
nations, submerging the will under heavier incapaci- 
ties, increasing the whole inward misrule, and disorder, 
and making the death more dead — a more cogently 
coercive element, perhaps, for that reason — till finally 
the subject, appalled by his condition, and visited by 
some unwonted sense of goodness in the salvation 
offered him, yields himself tenderly up to that crisis 
of discipline which makes it the beginning of a better 
mind and life. And no matter at what period in life, 
whether early or late, the call to repentance may be 
made, there is never to be a calling away from the 
law ; for the cogencies of the law are always wanted 
as truly as the grace of the commandment. They 
w r ork together, and are of right never to be separated ; 
for the killing factor, so conceived, has a really 
beneficent office, indispensable to the true result. 
There are passages, we know, that appear to set the 
two factors, the killing and the life-giving, completely 
apart, as when it is said, " For ye are not under the 



MADE UP IN THIS LIFE. 139 

law but under grace." But this is a contrast that 
holds good only in a certain general way. The mean- 
ing can not he that we are not under law as truly as 
ever, but only that we are not under it as going to be 
saved in works of legalism by it. The being under 
grace too, is not a device to separate us from the law 
— but to beget us anew in the living spirit of it. 

II. It is another point to be considered, as regards 
our supposed scheme of discipline, that Justice after 
while it includes the law of God as a discipline. 
necessary factor in its operation, it must not here be 
the law as backed by judicial sanctions, but only by 
such casual, ungraduated sanctions as will duly en- 
force the discipline. There is accordingly no justice 
work done here, as we perfectly know. We do not 
live in a scheme of awards, but in a scheme of 
probatory discipline. Persons are not treated alike, 
nor wrongs alike, neither is any thing kept in the scale 
of desert. God reserves the liberty in his own hands, 
to turn our experience here in what way of stress or 
modified comfort will best advance his good purpose 
in us. At the same time, while nothing is being done 
with us here in the terms of justice, we are duly 
notified and certified of a time future, when our 
present mixed way of discipline will be over, and we 
shall be carried on with our bad ways uncorrected, 
if so it must be, to be settled on the hard-pan basis 
of justice pure and simple, receiving every man ac- 
cording to his work. 

Here we touch the province of justice for the first 



140 NO ISSUE FOR JUSTICE 

time, only we have had a certain forelook of it kept 
Kept apprised alive in us always, which has had great 
of justice to value according to its cogency. And 
that we may not lose this advantage, 
ways have been carefully devised to keep the sense 
of this dread future alive in us, in a perpetually dis- 
tinct remembrance. For while nothhig is ever done 
here that belongs to justice, our Christianity itself 
undertakes to be a judgment day gospel, and Christ 
himself to be the judge of the world. There is also 
going on here always a kind of pre-judicial distribu- 
tion, which bears a look of justice so impressive, that, 
by many, it is taken, and even by many preachers 
preached, as being the very matter of justice itself. 
It comes in as the retaliatory or lex- talionis matter of 
our experience — the same which Christ had in mind 
when he said, " with what measure ye meet it shall 
be measured to you again." And so much is there 
of this retributive style in the facts of the world, that 
a moderately ingenious person will cite instances 
enough for a kind of judgment-day show, in vindica- 
tion of almost any right principle — as if Providence 
were concerned, by a kind of Gatling delivery, 
to pour the missiles of justice into every offense and 
offender. And there is beside a certain aspect of 
validity in these facts of quasi retribution. They are 
such kind of consequences as go with the great 
coercive law of our discipline, to be its vindicators. 
We only mistake when we conceive them to be certain 
or inevitable in their occurrence, and to be graded 



MADE UP IN THIS LIFE 141 

always in the scale of desert. But irregular as they 
are and desultory, they make an element in the scene 
of our discipline that' is even indispensable. They 
show us too that while Christianity is engaged to clear 
us of the dread inexorabilities of justice here, so that we 
may have our trial in liberty,' it still manages to keep 
us in the clear beholding of them always, that we 
may not miss the benefit of their cogency. 

But what, in this view, of justice as an element of 
our religious experience— justice in the What to be said 
law, and to be delivered from in the of justice. 
grace of the cross, and justice in the personal char- 
acter of God? I wish it were not to be expected 
that some true believers will miss, in the statement I 
am giving, any such reference to the justice of God 
as they are wont to indulge, when they magnify the 
exemption Christ has bought for us by his suffering. 
I suppose it is partly as a result of this piously meant 
practice, and partly because the justice of God is 
closer to the appreciative grasp of their natural un- 
derstanding, than any other of God's attributes, that 
they are so prone to be forward in their admira- 
tion of it. It comes into their range of thought be- 
cause it is that attribute of God which uses force, 
and so becomes the king attribute ; as the thunders 
of Olympus made Jupiter the father of the gods. 
And yet the word justice does not once occur in the 
New Testament, neither does the word just in any 
single case where it relates to Christ and his death, 
save in the little expression, "that he might be 



142 NO ISSUE FOR JUSTICE 

just,"* where it should be translated " that he might 
be righteous." Meantime it is sufficiently clear that 
God himself does not rate his justice as the fore-front 
attribute of his nature. He does not say, with sundry 
teachers who are in the particular type of sensibility 
that most readily admires this nearly political attri- 
bute, justice first, then love and pity afterward. He 
is willing to have us think of him as slow to anger, 
but not as slow to righteousness, or love, or patience. 
And when he is constrained to let some fire-tempest 
fall on men, he will call it " his work, his strange 
work, his act, his strange act;"f as if he had short 
love to it himself. Neither does he ever magnify him- 
self in that he can be evenly just in his judgments — 
doing always and by all rejectors exactly as they de- 
serve — partly, it may be, because he knows that very 
imperfect creatures, such as we, can do by our enemies 
what they deserve, a great deal more easily than we 
can what is better than they deserve. He will, of 
course, be upright before all things else, but the 
dealing back on transgressors what their crimes de- 
serve, is a very different matter. One is God's right- 
eousness, the other his justice ; one his act, the other 
his strange act. Only not so strange that it can not 
be done when nothing else can be. 

And still that such a special and fondly dispropor- 
tionate esteem should be felt towards the justice 
of God, when Christ dies to win our deliverance 
from it, is even the more remarkable, when the reason 

* Romans iii, 2G. f Isaiah xxviii, 21. 



MADE UP IN THIS LIFE. 143 

stated for his intervention is so palpably bad, so 
galling morally to our most inborn convictions. If 
vre look into the cases of moral analogy that have 
been cited — the school, the family, the army — we do 
not find that we are disturbed lest the law may be 
losing its penalties because of the obedience and 
liberty, coming in. What were the law and the pen- 
alties for, but to be fulfilled in just such obedience 
and liberty ? Or take the case of intemperance and 
the dreadful woes that are set to be its powers of 
coercion. Why do not the brothers in humanity who 
undertake to bring off a victim, feel bound, as vica- 
rious woesmen, to make up the penalties which are 
going to be taken away, by a contribution of pains 
that will keep them good. And if they can not give 
in pains of dissipation, why not give in pains of good 
behavior ? The absurdity of such a* proceeding we see 
without difficulty, but when we come up into the field 
of religion, we drop out the conception of law as an 
element of coercive discipline, and take it simply 
as a thermometric register, to record, for justice, the 
highest point which the heat of transgression has 
reached. 

And then what has been shown by the said law- 
register, is going to claim the awards of justice to bo 
eternal justice shortly, unless there is a maintained by 
respite obtained by some grace of penal C0m P ensatl0n - 
suffering, by which justice is satisfied. The justice 
of the law, or the justice of God, in other words, is 
expected to be satisfied by penalties undeserved, con- 



144 NO ISSUE FOR JUSTICE 

tributed by Christ to pay off penalties deserved ! 
And by such a transaction as this it is, that the 
strangely partial deference to God's justice, of which I 
just now spoke, is produced by Christ's death. It 
is an operation which buys God's justice out of the 
world, where it can no longer be found, and does it 
by the pains of Christ, which are the pains of inno- 
cence ! Why, to stay in such a world, where the holi- 
ness of God is enveloped in such a nimbus of confu- 
sion as to principles, might very well be a hardship. 
Besides what do we understand by a penalty unde- 
served? There is plainly no such thing in rerum 
natura. Penalties deserved are simply what a bad 
deserving may create. But where there is no bad 
deserving they are out of consequence, and what is 
more, even out of possible idea. And again, if pen- 
alties undeserved are to pay the debt of justice for 
penalties deserved, the two kinds have no common 
measure, and how shall we state the equation between 
them ? How much straight line is equal to how much 
right angle ? How much pain of remorse may be 
duly atoned by how much pain of rheumatism ? Shall 
we change the word then, shall we put the suffer- 
ings of Christ against the sufferings of guilty men ? 
Innocent suffering then, to be gotten some- 
where, any where, even out of Christ, is to make 
up the quantum which the law demands for all 
transgression. Why, such a total, footing up in- 
finite, would even be an offense. Sufferings are 
too much a drug in God's worlds every where, 






MADE UP IN THIS LIFE. 145 

to allow his making up the honors of his justice in 
their computation. 

But there is still another difficulty by which our 
theologians of the last century began Public justice 
to be sorely pressed. If the law is invented, 
satisfied, or the justice of God satisfied, by the contri- 
butions of penalty Christ has made in his death, 
what becomes of justice after that for any body, and 
where is the possibility left of future punishment for 
even such as die incorrigible ? The common way 
had been to assert only a partial or particular atone- 
ment, made for the elect. But our New England 
teachers were not quite willing to tell the non-elect 
that they are down for justice any way, and as little 
to proclaim a free release to all, on the ground of a 
general satisfaction. They struck for a new theologic 
invention, therefore ; viz., a public justice for all men, 
which is no justice in particular, but only a pool for 
such as may come to repentance, and then a dis- 
tributive justice waiting for each particular man, who 
may die in his sins after his day is ended. The public 
justice is not made by Christ's endurance of any 
man's penalty, but is a public character of justice 
made up for God, by what expression of justice may 
be yielded in Christ's death, conceived to be equal 
to the expression of justice that would be afforded 
by all the penalties exacted of all the world. In this 
view Christ is the virtual substitute or compensation 
for all the pains of all transgression. Sometimes a 

different way of statement is adopted, to escape the 

13 



146 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

obvious objection that, as Christ is supposed to suffer 
what is really nobody's penalty in particular, his suf- 
fering can not make any expression of God's justice 
at all ; his death therefore, it is said, expresses the 
abhorrence of God to sin, as the penalties exacted of 
all wrong doers would, and so they make up the de- 
sired character of justice. How much is gained by 
this shift of expression will better appear, when it is 
proved that God's abhorrence to sin can any way 
find offense in the pure, unsmiling beauty of Christ, 
so as to be expressed by his suffering. 

This most sorry theologic invention has had as 
much credit gained for it as it can bear. It is most 
distinctly, most provincially new. I know of no 
scripture that yields it even a complexion of evidence. 
It discovers two justices, or kinds of justice, one that 
is for use in this life, and another for the life to come. 
The meanings are in the last degree artificial, and the 
modes of their relations to each other, and to sin, and 
to a possible way of salvation, are too subtle and con- 
fused to be distinctly apprehended by any but persons 
thoroughly practiced in the subtleties. How much 
better is the very simple, almost self-generated state- 
ment I have given — no justice at all in this world ; 
exact, inevitable justice for all incorrigible subjects in 
the world to come." 

* My subject is nowise responsible for what the condition of justice 
hereafter is to be, but I am so little unwilling to be responsible for 
what opinions I have in the matter, that I set down a perfectly frank 
statement of them, and leave it without concern to answer for itself. 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 147 

III. It now remains to speak of the last and most 
distinctively christian of the three points named in 
my general statement, or deduction : _. 

J & Chr»ac mcar- 

viz., that the coercive discipline we are nated into tiio 
under — including the law element and «*"**« disci- 
what elements of Providential enforce- 
ment are added — waiting for no pains of justice to 
re-establish it and re-cement its broken order, is con- 
secrated anew forever, and more than consecrated, 
endued with transcendent efficacy, by Christ incar- 
nated into it, and dying in it and for it. The coercive 

1. The allotments or awards of justice nereafter will not be made 
up, it is most agreeable to suppose, by judgment passed on all tho 
particular acts done, but will be the total effect or damage of them, 
so that every man will suffer just what he is, or has become. 

2. The state of future awards will not be a new probation ; God 
would doubtless give us fifty new trials if it would do us any good, 
but there is not the least probability of any such result, but of great 
moral damage „and confusion rather. (Yid. One Trial Better than, 
Many, — Sermons on Living Subjects). 

3. Still every bad soul will be forever free, nevertheless, to the be- 
ginning of a new life, and will have no doubt of his acceptance in it. 

4. The bad society will be separate probably from the good, and 
that for their own comfort, if for no other reason. 

5. From the known effects of wicked feeling and practice in the 
reprobate characters, we expect that the staple of being and capacity 
in such will be gradually diminished, and the possibility is thus sug- 
gested that, at some remote period, they may be quite wasted away, 
or extirpated. 

6. Of course their suffering will be reduced according to their re- 
duced capacity ; for it is no fixed quantity set against the reckoning 
of old sins, but is always to be grading itself anew, according to what 
they are and have capacity on hand to be. 



148 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

discipline was organically framed and set in order for 
the world, even from the first, and long ages before 
the appearing of Christ. It included, of course, the 
law and, beside that, all the vast material of outward 
expression, such as might second or assist the general 
endeavor of the discipline — the health or disease of 
the body, the seasons, the bounties of nature, the op- 
pressions and liberties, the wars, the captivities and 
migrations, all the private and personal benefits too 
secret to be named, all the ministries of human love 
and friendship. These all together are not Christ, 
but taken as additions to the naked authority of law, 
they go a certain way to help out its otherwise barely 
coercive efficacy. But a great and supereminent- 
ly glorious addition now arrives — Christ is born 
into the discipline as before in operation, and be- 
comes the quickening life and central factor of it. 
And this is the change that we celebrate as Chris- 
tianity ; a change that is just as great as must needs 
take place, when the impersonal and dry machine 
composed of law and world — absolute law and 
scarcely responsive world — has God's full sensibility 
and sanctifying life poured in, to moisten the dryness 
of the discipline and make it a complete gospel. So 
that now it goes no more by thrustings on of enforce- 
ment only, but by such powers of unenforcement as 
may be looked for, in the suffering love and gentle 
endurance of the Lamb. The commandment is here 
come, and the discipline that was like to be too 
nearly penal, working too much in the way of fear 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 149 

and mere self-interest, and too little in the way of 
inspiration, is now to be consummated as a way of 
complete and perfect liberty. 

Christ then is here, we now proceed to say, incar- 
nated into the discipline we are under, His su g- er i ng 
and membership with us in its adversi- is the incarna- 
ties and trials ; in the enduring of uon ' 
which he is brought into conditions of unspeakable 
suffering. When we say that Christ is incarnate thus 
in our humanity, we commonly appear to mean very 
little by it, more than that he takes on the look and 
speaks with the voice of a man. We seem to think 
of him more as a passenger than as a born resident, 
and we only see him on his way through, doing many 
beautiful things, and suffering specially nothing ex- 
cept in a sharp theologic crisis at the close. What it 
means for him to be incarnate, we do not consider de- 
liberately enough to grasp the idea and measure the 
consequences ; and above all the consequences of 
personal suffering to himself. True it is understood 
that he is here as one of us for a time, but what 
special cause of tragedy there may be in that, more 
than belongs to the average experience of men them- 
selves., we do not perceive. Besides it is the cross, 
we think, that brought upon him all that was to be 
accounted specially severe in his experience. His 
incarnation was no part of his suffering, being only a 
matter of less cost to him probably than our incarnate 
state is to us. In this manner we fall out of key as 

regards any proper estimate of his life; for the par- 

13* 



150 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

tieiilar crisis of Lis death, short and sharp as it was, 
comprised but a very small part of the suffering and 
sacrifice his mission cost him. 

Let us see if we can bring ourselves into a right 
opinion of what is involved in Christ's incarnation, 
as respects the matter of his suffering. It means that 
he is incarnated into common condition with us, under 
what is called the curse. He could not reach us as a 
teacher, helper, friend, and Saviour, except by com- 
ing into membership with us in our human race 
itself. No plan to work upon us from a point above 
us, or one side of us, could operate with any promise 
of effect. He must become a habitant with- us, a 
fellow nature, a brother, and that he could not be, 
without being entered into what is our principal dis- 
tinction as being under the curse. For this does not 
mean, as many very hastily judge, a state of doom 
or punition, but simply a condition of discipline or- 
dained for spiritual profit and recovery. It means 
exactly what I have been setting forth as a condition 
of coercive discipline, or as I have once or twice 
called it, a condition of penally coercive discipline — 
adding that it is penally operative, in no sense of 
punition or judicial award, but only in a way to im- 
press the consequences and demerit of actions, in 
such degrees of severity as will best serve the moral 
benefit of the subjects. The curse, in this view, is 
all for benefit, only working partly by what is disa- 
greeable or distressful. Underneath was the word of 
the law, then above are harnessed to it, to work with 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 151 

it, all the multifarious cogencies that make up the 
total of our life. Christ will suffer nothing as by his 
own fault, or to correct him in his own wrong, 
nothing to coerce him in his own choices, and yield 
him personal benefit in the discipline. He is here for 
no such purpose, but only to bring himself personally 
near to us, for our benefit. His incarnation puts him 
in the compass of all that belongs to the solidarity 
of the curse, except that he is touched by none 
of its contaminations. He will suffer of course from 
the wrongs of w T rong-doing men, as truly as if he 
were one of them himself; and probably as much 
more severely as the holiness of his life, and the 
beauty of his actions, will more provoke the hos- 
tility of the wicked, and he himself be more 
tenderly sensitive to injury because of his undefiled 
sensibility. 

Raising now the question, how far Christ must 
needs come into sufferings by a ministry scarcely realize 
incarnated into our penally coercive our own suffer- 
discipline, it may be important for us mss ' 
first to revise, or make up by a new inspection, the 
inventory of our own suffering. True as we know it 
to be, that pains send us into the world, and pains 
send us out, and that the whole space between our 
birth and death is thick-set with twinges, and troubles, 
and bad hours, and real or imagined wrongs, each 
now successor shuts the gate of oblivion on its pre- 
ceding out-goer, and we fancy that we really suffer 
nothing, but are all the while just coasting along the 



152 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

shores of comfort. True we are not so much happy 
as comfortably not happy, not so much well as with- 
out distress. It is much as if an enjoyment were 
graded for us by a sort of dumb toothache scarcely 
perceptible. And yet there are times of pungent 
suffering coming upon almost every one of us — storms 
of disease, bitter mournings, prospects blasted, 
treasons in the house — even that large half of the 
world who think they have been always going com- 
fortably on, have yet suffered immensely in the total 
of their hurts and fears, and wrongs. There are 
many, I know, who make it a point of honor to laugh 
at all such computations of suffering, much as if it 
were the way of good navigation to throw the log- 
book overboard and put the foul weather days under 
oblivion. They had much better keep the log — and 
use it. 

Secondly, we observe that our human suffering 
No principle does n °t come by any principle of de- 
of desert in our se rt, and therefore make less of it. 
su enng. There is plainly enough no law of 

penalty or justice in it, and that, if we could keep our 
conscience frohi sometimes applying it, amounts to 
something like a discovery, we think, that it has no 
meaning, and amounts to little or nothing worthy of 
attention. We do not observe that the main stress 
of it comes in the principle of solidarity, where, as re- 
gards the more deserving, it has even a kind of sub- 
stitutional look. History is full of it. Suffering is, 
in a sense, the staple of history. It tails on men by 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 153 

generations, nations, kingdoms, and continents, mass- 
ing its subjects, and taking them on the side of their 
social liability and necessity, where the curse of sin 
falls heaviest. And the woes that pour in thus, by 
latitudes and longitudes mapped for suffering, arc 
fearful and sometimes horrible even beyond thought — 
drought, and blight, and frost, and famine, pestilence 
and plague, earthquake and hurricane, cities on fire, 
kingdoms soaked in blood — all which come as a good 
God sends them, partly to show us for our benefit 
that his discipline overhangs all mortal peoples and 
affairs ; which also, when he wills it, can find how to 
make itself subduingly felt. It is here, it is every 
where, and it comes in no slight reckoning, as we 
sometimes sleepily imagine — the whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth with it. 

Thirdly, we fall into another oversight, in turning 
to no right account the admitted fact Why do the 
that so many of the best, and purest, best and purest 
and sweetest, of the race do actually su er 
seem to suffer most. It is as if the solidarity-princi- 
ple just referred to, turned its masses of bad 
liability down upon these hapless victims of sorrow 
and distress, to get an argument particular enough 
for the heavy-going, lumbering world to feel. We 
think it hard, we ask how can a good God do it? and 
yet they are the more honored on this account ; being 
chosen for their suffering office, because their suffer- 
ing will draw sympathy, and thaw out the frozen 
apathy of such as, deserving to suffer themselves, could 



154 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

suffer only with small effect. Who will care what 
they may suffer themselves ? what human tear will 
they set flowing, when they only take their pains in 
due proportion ? But there is a feeling loosened 
always by the terrible woe that a good man suffers 
after the Christly fashion, by which we are all the 
more tenderly affected, that he appears to be suffer- 
ing, not on his own account as truly as on ours. Most 
beautiful is the office which these lower, sub-Saviour 
sufferers are called to fill. And how touching is the 
argument they give us, to correct the mistake into 
which we so commonly fall, when we recollect that 
Christ is the exceptional man, upon whom no penalty 
can fall, and let ourselves down thus upon the impres- 
sion that his liabilities of suffering are smaller even 
than if he were a strictly human person. It does not 
occur to us that in being pure and spotless far be- 
yond the examples just referred to, he may be chosen 
of God to go as far beyond them in suffering, as they 
beyond their fellows. 

Just here, saying no more of our under-estimate of 
Christ's suffering, in the under-estimate Ave have of our 
own, I think we may begin to feel the window lifted 
Suffers °reatly wnere the fresh air blows, and to have 
because of his the suffering of Christ's mission opened 
pun y ' to our discovery, in a way to cause no 

revulsion. He suffers heavily because he is pure, and 
just according to his purity ; for there is nothing in 
him to sort with the curse he is under. The blight, 
the pain, the stormy troubles, and the bitter hate are 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. % 155 

not for him. His pure, sweet nature, tainted by no 
evil touch or stain, the immense sensibilities of his 
divine innocence, recoil from the gentlest penal- 
ties, with a feeling dreadfully revolted, such as we, in 
the blunted sensibility of sin, can not even imagine. 
It is as if the condemnations of God were upon him 
— as they are on all the solidarities of the race into 
which he is come. The disgusts generated in the 
penal discipline of character, fill his pure, great feeling 
with revulsions known to him, but' unimaginable 
by us. He suffers all the suffering of mankind, not 
as we do in mere sympathy with the suffering itself, 
but as beholding it in its guilty causes — loathing it 
because it is so base, because of its fallen glory, and 
because it is so bitterly poisoned by injustice to God — 
a suffering in which the displeasures of God and his 
compassions are united by a conjunction that is itself 
the utmost possibility of suffering. 

It is also another aggravation of Christ's suffering, 
that he has so much mind, and a per- suffers accord- 
ception so piercing, to apprehend the log to his amount 
utmost significances of acts, and causes, ° rmn ' 
and consequences. Little minds have little sufferings, 
according to the insect measures of their possibility. 
What do we better know than that minds in high 
culture are capable of greater pains under insult and 
wrong ? Thus if such a man as Wordsworth, or Goethe, 
or the elegant Cavour, had been taken captive by 
some wild cannibal race, and compelled to look on 
the preparations for his sacrifice, it would not be so 



156 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

much the dread of death that would cost him suffer- 
ing, but it would be the horrible conception of being 
himself incorporate in these ferocious and disgusting 
monsters. His tastes, his imaginations, his conception 
of what belongs to all dear sensibility in life, would 
set him in convulsive shudder. In which we have 
only a most feeble, far-off illustration of what the 
great Christ-soul must suffer in the approaching scenes 
of the crucifixion. He had come down out of the up- 
per world, where he had been partaker, from the first, 
in all God's opinions and sentiments concerning sin. 
He did not conceive that the crowds of raging per- 
secutors gathered about him were simply unfortunate 
or lunatic, but that they were maddened penally by 
their discipline, for though it was not on them as in 
punishment, it was powerful enough in its wild ex- 
asperations, to show them what sin is, and raise a 
frightful argument against it. He saw their curse in 
their sin, and the pungency of Lis suffering was ac- 
cording to the full and divinely cultured perception he 
had of it, of its relations to God and the world, and 
of the possibilities of character. He had read the 
true conception of it in the bosom of the Father, and 
now he has it on him and feels the horrible touch 
of it. These bloodthirsty F.ejis of the priesthood 
and the people are conspiring his death. What a 
conception that a being so great, so interlocked with 
divinity, is going here to be actually murdered ! does 
he not, should he not, feel it himself, according to the 
perception he has of its criminality and the astound- 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 157 

ing impressions it will raise in all the good great minds 
of the glorified. What a response has- he in it to the 
all sacrilicing and most tender love in which, by his 
act of incarnation, he takes the sin of the world upon 
him and makes his life a sorrow. 

Once more, Christ suffers the more heavily, no 
doubt, that he is in a failing cause. And the misery 
is not so much that it appears to fail, as that it should 
be thrown and trampled by just that Suffers in a, 
which only the penal madness of the failm ° cause - 
world could incite. It sinks under the hatred of 
goodness, such hatred as only bigotry instigates, by 
the arts and semblances of hypocrisy. And this 
hatred hovers about his path in all his rounds of min- 
istry, dogs him in his journeys, makes a larger and 
continually widening conspiracy. By and by his dis- 
ciples begin to act shyly, and apparently try to get 
away from him. Only the dear children, as it were to 
show how much more reliable inspiration is than 
prudence, cling to him still, and pay him their heaven- 
lifted Ilosannas, when the full-grown wise drop away. 
He is therefore in a double sorrow now, that his dis- 
ciples, who so much need his presence to keep them 
in any sort of courage as respects the faith of a king- 
dom, are going here to encounter a loss they are little 
qualified to bear, and he himself to encounter a far 
greater loss from their desertion, in the stress of his 
last hours. O what a hell of selfishness and falsity is 
this, that such a friend as Christ can not fasten the 

faith of his friends ! It even puts a lot of shame 

14 



158 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

upon him, that lie has undertaken to do and suffer so 
much for creatures so bereft of dignity by the awful 
undoing of their sin. Could he look on heroes gath- 
ering to him and round him, ready to bear his cross 
after him, souls made great and strong by his presence 
among them, it would greatly mitigate the pain of 
his approaching fall. But to see all courage oozing 
out, and all faith vanishing, in advance of his fatal 
hour, adds a touch of ignominy to his end more nearly 
insupportable than any other. 

Let us glance now at three or four of the scenes 
where Christ's great suffering is most remarkably dis- 
played, and also the fact that he has it upon him, 
consciously, as the curse or penal shame and disaster 
of our transgression. First, I name the temptation, at 

The tempta- which his public life began. Incar- 
tlon - nated into the curse of the world, he 
is now to have his part in a state clemonized by evil ; 
and it will be the point of his first great trial to mas- 
ter all the physical taint of his birth, and so far 
humanly corrupted participation. Another storm, 
let loose upon him by the new-born consciousness of 
his Messiahship is the felt solidarity of the sin- wrath, 
rolled in now so tempestuously, that it takes a 
whole forty clays to get that full possession of himself 
and his plans, that will enable him to go out upon his 
work. Meantime he is closeted in the grim wilder- 
ness, wrestling with the troubles that crowd upon his 
mind and disturb his counsel, and even forgetting that 
he is hungry. Angels come about to minister, and 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 159 

it appears to be intimated that the wild Leasts are 
drawn together round him, by strange sympathy with 
some awful sorrow perceptible even to them. It is 
not common to class this scene with other scenes of 
suffering in Christ's life, but it has an aspect dreadfully 
forlorn, and a sin-stamp quite unmatched unless by 
the crucifixion. 

The weeping of Christ over the city is told in fewer 
words, but it is the more important His weeping 
because it is so casual in the occurrence over the Clty - 
as to show what feeling he is in habitually — what 
mountain loads of sorrow from the blasted, guilt- 
stricken world are always upon him — " If thou hadst 
known in this thy day the things that belong to thy 
peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes !" 

But we pass, at this point, to the agonies so called 
of the garden and the cross, both of wdiich are often 
conceived to borrow their intensity of suffering from 
the wrath or justice of God, let fall upon the sufferer 
that he may take the brunt of our penalty, and com- 
pensate or satisfy the law in our behalf. " The cup," 
it is imagined, can mean nothing less than this. It 
can not be the "cup of trembling" or "the cup of 
astonishment" but must be " the cup of justice," be- 
cause nothing less than the justice- The cup and 
power of God's hand upon the sufferer, tbe *% Qn J- 
could produce such demonstrations. It may be so, 
but I see not how any one can be sure that he might 
not suffer as severely under the solidarity principle or 
the world's penal-sanction causes, as he would under 



160 CHRIST RECONSECRATES THE LAW 

justice. Be that as it may, we have a most improb- 
able, perfectly incredible mixture, when he is set be- 
fore us, under such a conception, calling on his poor 
disciples, in his awful prostrations, to stay by him 
and help him — yes, help him to bear God's justice ! 
To his groaning on the ground, aud his body dripping 
blood from the pores, they might possibly give the 
comfort of a little sympathy, but if he is being 
wrenched in this manner by the justice of God, what 
right have they to help him against that ? True the 
suffering is strangely severe, and yet indications of 
the same kind are reported as having sometimes 
been observed in the case of men suffering under 
great mental distress. Morever demonstrations of this 
nature appear to be quite sufficiently accounted 
for, when three facts are brought together ; (1,) the 
structural frailty of the physically human person, too 
little able to support the reactions of a superhuman 
sensibility ; (2,) the extraordinary movement on that 
sensibility, by the madness and wild exasperation of 
so great multitudes hasting to precipitate themselves 
unwittingly on him in a deed that comprehends both 
sacrilege and murder; (3,) the mortal exhaustion 
that has now come upon him by his brotherhood rela- 
tion, so long continued, with humanity ; where he has 
nothing to receive, only wrongs and disgusts to bear, 
and sympathy and suffering patience to give. 

As regards the cross, taken often for a scene of 
divine justice, the argument would be much easier and 
better supported, if the problem were to show that the 



BY HIS INCARNATE SUFFERING. 161 

justice displayed is a visitation of God upon the 
people. They realty seem to do all in ^ law of j us . 
a way of judicial blindness, and take tice over the 
on the lunatic airs of their dispossession, C1UC1 X10n ' 
in ways of cunning and prejudice and passion that 
completely represent the penal madness of sin — Pilate, 
Herod, Caiaphas, the soldiers, the multitude, all in 
character under the curse together. And when that 
awful word is spoken — " This is your hour, the power 
of darkness," we even shudder at the suggestion. 
And yet it is not these, we hear, but Christ him- 
self who is under the ban of justice ! Innocence 
gibbeted and dying by what every body pronounces 
the most horrible murder on record, he is having laid 
upon him, we are told, the justice of God, and these 
monsters in their murder are God's ministers, doing 
the justice upon him ! The mixture of idea, character, 
and fact — the Good Being using wickedness, and wick- 
edness doing the honors of justice — make up a com- 
pound so incongruously bad that we are cruelly revolt- 
ed by it. Yes, but the Saviour cries out himself — 
" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" And 
this, we are taught, is a plain declaration of the judi- 
cial withdrawment of the Father. Does any human 
creature then believe that Christ is actually complain- 
ing here, in his last breath, of being left to die de- 
serted of Gocl, or under the ban of his justice % In- 
terjections are never to be taken pathologically in this 
manner; for what is this outcry but an interjection 

of distress vented in scripture words crowding at the 

14* 



162 FIGURES OF SACRIFICE AND LAW 

moment on his brain? And lie as little means that 
God has deserted him as the Psalmist himself who 
was coming ont shortly in praise — " For he hath not 
despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, 
neither hath he hid his face from him, but when lie 
cried unto him he heard."* G-od had forsaken him, 
yet now he finds that he had not hid his face ! Fur- 
thermore what does Christ promise the poor malefac- 
tor dying at his side, but that he shall be with him 
this very day in paradise ? He seems to have forgot- 
ten that he is under the justice of God ! Was he not 
also saying a little while ago in glorious confidence — 
" Therefore doth my Father love me because I lay 
down my life for the sheep." And again — " I have 
glorified thee on the earth, and now I come to thee." 
And again, about the same time, in the same confi- 
dence — " Thinkest thou that I can not now pray to 
my Father, and he shall presently give me more than 
twelve legions of angels?" It could not on the whole 
be more clear that Christ came to his cross in the full 
consciousness of the Father's loving accord and 
sympathy, and that on the cross itself, he was hover- 
ing in thought round the gates of paradise just wait- 
ing to be opened, and beholding, close at hand, " the 
glory that he had with the Father before the world 
was." 

IY. 

I intimated some pages back a design to examine a 
few of the principal texts most commonly and con- 

* Psalms xxii, 1 and 24. 



fidently cited, to show that Christ was dealing with 
God's justice in the suffering of the cross, and that, in 
this great transaction with justice, we are to conceive 
him as fulfilling the principal errand of his ministry. 
Many persons will be held by a certain traditional ring 
of scripture in such authorities, and will not think it 
possible that these passages, so deeply imprinted by 
the iteration of years, have been really turned away 
from their original meaning by clumsy and false uses, 
and made to give a' testimony that was never in 
them. 

I wish it were possible in advance to rid ourselves 
of a certain hard-favored, narrow literalism, that lives 
on proof-texts made by paying no regard to the poetic 
genius of religious language, and by seizing on single 
clauses that, in figure, seem to favor a certain point, 
paying no regard to other clauses in other figures, that 
require to be accepted as qualifiers and correctives. 
This whole proof-text region has a most sterile, truth- 
forsaken aspect, and no ploughing through it of ridi- 
cule and remonstrance, appears to do much for it. 
The man who pours in a pitcher of milk to raise a 
cream on the sea, has about the same chance of 
success. 

We have no literal language for religious ideas. 
The exactest things that can be said No literal lan . 
must be somehow taken as in figure, guage for reli- 
as when Christ made answer to Peter gl0n ' 
— that one must forgive his brother not seven 
times only, but " until seventy times seven." There 



164: FIGURES OF SACRIFICE AND LAW 

we have it, as by arithmetic, but the man who 
should go back on his multiplication table, and draw 
out his conclusion that we are to forgive just four 
hundred and ninety times, would even raise a smile 
among the proof-text scholars ; and none the less, if 
he were to add, that the number seven is a sacred 
number, to be exactly taken always, according to the 
proper exactness of reverence ! In the expression of 
religious ideas we are ourselves under the same law. 
Thus I knew a little child who had been kept back 
some time from the story of Christ's death, lest she 
might be overmuch shocked by it. She was abund- 
antly shocked when it was at length given her, as 
her evening prayer made evident — " O Lord I am 
sorry you died ; I wish you had not saved us !" 
" The wicked little reprobate," some fiery St. Dom- 
inic of the former ages might have exclaimed, but our 
literal teachers now would, I think, be a little more 
lenient. Was there ever, in fact, a more genuinely 
touching, sweeter prayer? Though taken by the let- 
ter, it would not be as good. 

But there is a more particular consideration here 
that has a more particular application; viz., that terms 
of praise and personal gratitude almost always carry 
an over-tinted color, and set their subject forth in some 
Gratitude is free picturesque way of success. In an old 
to exaggeration. R oman prison more or less infected 
with poison from the region of malaria not far off, 
destructive fevers come and go, and many of the 
prisoners die. At length word is brought to a certain 



MUST BE CORRECTLY INTERPRETED. 165 

monk of the city, who has learned to follow his Master 
well and faithfully, that a notable prisoner, long time 
ago his private enemy, is beginning to show the tokens 
of the fever. Whereupon the godly monk says — " I 
must go to him then, since he is my enemy, trying, if 
I can for Christ's sake, to save him." He goes. ' By 
his faithful nursing and attendance the criminal is re- 
covered, and he himself, taking the infection, dies. 
Now in turn the rescued man, throwing out his soul 
in words, vainly tries to express the inexpressible 
tenderness of his obligation. lie writes and talks 
nothing but gratitude all his life long — testifying " O 
he bore my punishment " — " he became the criminal 
for me " — " stood in my lot of guilt " — " suffered all 
the bitterness of my bad desert." It will- not be 
strange if lie goes a long way beyond the redemptive 
fervors of Scripture to say — " he took my debt of jus- 
tice" — "satisfied the judgment of the law" — "bore 
the very sins I put upon him " — meaning, of course, 
nothing more than what he had been saying before. 
Finally, some time after the parties are gone, when 
their story itself is fading away, some one undertakes 
to make up his account of it ; and, dull-headed, blind- 
hearted literalist that he is, he takes up all the fervors 
of expression just recited, showing most conclusively 
from the words, that the good monk actually got the 
other's crime imputed to him, took the guilt of it, suf- 
fered the punishment, died in his place, and satisfied 
the justice of the law that he might be released. The 



166 FIGURES OF SACRIFICE AND LAW 

application of this belongs to almost all the scripture 
terms we have in question. 

The strongest and most relied on probably of all 
the proofs of a judicial significance in the case is this — 
Christ made a " Christ hath redeemed us from the 
curse for us. curse f the law, being made a curse for 
us ; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth 
on a tree."* But observe here, at the outset, that the 
curse of the law is exactly not the justice of God, 
but the penal-sanction discipline we are under. For 
the reference here is not to the denouncement by 
Moses of outward damage and loss, arrayed as curses 
to deter the people from disobedience,f — for Christ 
certainly had not undertaken a redemption from these 
— but to what is called more distinctively the curse at 
the original institution of our penal discipline itself 4 
Into this, as we have seen, Christ was incarnated, and 
here was to be the field of his redeeming work. It 
only occurs to the apostle as a verbal coincidence, 
though a little out of line as to any precise accord of 
meaning, that Christ crucified is to be more fitly 
called a curse, that any malefactor left hanging on a 
tree is by a maxim of the law so regarded — " Cursed 
is every one that hangeth on a tree."§ The rhetoric 
of his gratitude scorns detention by an over nice 
verbal exactness. Enough that he will magnify 
Christ's coming clown to be with us, under the world- 
blight of our sin, where the corporate frenzy, rage and 
hate trample and tear his divine person as if he 
* Gal. iii, 13. f Deut. xxviii, 16-19. % Gen - iu \ 14-19. § Deut. xxi, 23. 



MUST BE CORRECTLY INTERPRETED. 167 

were no better than a malefactor, as lie is a member 
now of the race. The retributive liability he is in, is 
severe enough to bear even a look of justice. We 
only happen to know that no suffering of our own 
under the curse is justice, and that he is suffering 
with us in our lot as it is. If we call it penal, as I 
have called the disciplinary sanctions arranged for us, 
it is not the penality of justice. 

Peter declares himself in terms very different as to 
figure, but closely correspondent in The declaration 
idea, "Who his own self bare our sins of Peter - 
in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to 
sin, should live unto righteousness ; by whose stripes 
ye were healed."* It is difficult here to imagine that 
he himself very closely considered the items, or 
sub-clauses of his statement — how the sins came into 
Christ's body without making him a sinner, and how, 
not being a sinner, he bore them, and what for, and 
with what effect — but two things are specially evident 
in his words, and in these their main significance lies ; 
(1,) that Christ is so far entered by his incarnate per- 
sonality, into the curse, or penal woes of transgression, 
that he has them in himself, and is lifting them off by 
the beautifully softened power he gives them in the 
felt conjunction of his suffering sympathy ; (2,) that 
no thought of compensation is here being made to 
God's justice, for the terminal effect is to be in us ; 
" that we being dead to sin should live unto righteous- 
ness." Besides it is to have its effect like all penal- 

* 1 Peter ii. 24. 



168 FIGURES OF SACRIFICE AND LAW 

sanction discipline, in a complete healing up of all the 
scars of transgression — " For by his stripes ye were 
healed." In the next chapter Peter holds the same 
general idea — " For Christ also hath once suffered for 
sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us 
to God."* It is not said that he suffered in the 
terms of justice to buy us off from justice, but simply 
in self-sacrifice to bring us off. 

Sometimes Christ's own language is cited, when he 
declares that "the Son of Man came, not to be 
Christ gives a ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
ransom. ^ yQ j^ g life a ransom for many."f Is 
not a ransom a price paid commonly to buy off cap- 
tives and criminals? Yes, and very commonly not. 
" I will ransom them from the power of the grave,";]: 
does not mean that God will make payment to the 
grave for obtaining a release. To hang the conclusion 
of a judicial satisfaction for sin upon this mere word, 
just as capable of an idea less revolting, is a very 
sad illustration of what the proof-text making process 
may do. How different the dear great thought of 
Christ when he says, I came to minister and not to 
buy, to offer up my life as the quickening power of 
unbought life in you. And this word bought, 
" bought with a price," we need not go over the same 
argument concerning that. 

It was most natural that the putting over of sins 

The scape- upon criminals, and especially on the 

S oat - head of the goat, to signify by his being 

* 1 Peter hi, 18. f Mark x, 45. % Hosea xiii, 14. 



MUST BE CORRECTLY INTERPRETED. 169 

driven out into the wilderness, the deportation of sin, 
should become a favorite symbol often of the beautiful 
office taken by Christ, in the assumption of our sadly 
broken, dreadfully enthralled state. As when Paul 
declares, " For he hath made him to be sin for us, who 
knew no sin ; that we might be made the righteous- 
ness of God in him."* I will not go into any argu- 
ment here to show that no sin of ours ever could 
be entered into the pure soul of Christ, or could 
stay there for one mortal breath without being 
burned up in the flame of his purity. The apostle 
plainly enough means to assert no such assumption 
or transference, but simply that Christ bowed himself 
on our lot of sorrow and painful, wrathful disorder, in 
a mind to die into us and let us die with him. Be- 
coming sin for us in this manner, his hope is that we 
may be made the righteousness of God in him. ~Not 
that imputed righteousness which many think evens 
up the score of justice, but that living righteousness, 
also in a different sense imputed, which is the right- 
eousness of God himself, and is " by faith unto all 
and upon all them that believe." 

It now remains to take a little more deliberate re- 
view of the fifty-third of Isaiah, which, I think, may 
well be rated as the most wonderful of all human com- 
positions. We have in it a general stock fund opened 
of vicarious images and offices, set forth Isaiah's mean- 
as pertaining to a certain nameless per- m ° stafced - 
son never heard of, and visibly quite unknown to the 

* 2 Cor. v, 21. 
15 



170 FIGURES OF SACRIFICE AND LAW 

prophet liimself. Far back in the dark of his only 
half-historic time, when the Greeks are scarcely begin- 
ning to be Greece, he brings forth his man of the 
cross, showing him only by tokens that he does not 
understand himself; and the picture is so Christly, 
that criticism, turning every way and searching right 
and left for some original in story, or poetry, out of 
which it could be made, is obliged to utterly fail and 
desist. If heaven was ever opened, it was opened 
here, and the note of vicarious function, running like 
a voice of litany through so many terms and images, 
softens our wonder into worship. All the greater 
reason that we should not let our reverence be turned 
to superstition by the narrow, over-stringent literalism 
of our interpretation. Thus when the Evangelist 
Matthew* says of Christ and his healings, " That it 
might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet 
Esaias, Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
sicknesses," a very little good sense will forbid our 
imagining that Christ literally took all the diseases 
of his patients — their fevers, blindnesses, palsies, lep- 
rosies — on himself ; and will put us under a caution 
against the too literal construction of the other fig- 
ures which follow, f When the prophet says, " wound- 
ed for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities," 
it is not to be doubted that he conceives some kind 
of penal infliction in the suffering endured. And 
then the question follows, whether it is the penality 
of our state of discipline, or of justice itself, which 
* Matth. viii, IT. \ Vid. Note p. 44-5, former treatise. 



MUST BE CORRECTLY INTERPRETED. 171 

lias no place in this present world ? And then still 
another question, whether the two prepositions for 
mean for as in payment for our, transgressions, or only 
for in the sense of being incurred by him in his en- 
gagement in our behalf. It is important also to note 
the final clause — " and with his stripes we are healed," 
where the figure of healing gives a function to the 
suffering that never can be made to go with justice — 
justice does not heal. It follows " and the Lord hath 
laid on him the iniquity of us all," and perhaps we 
take it as a solemn annoim cement of the very impos- 
sible fact that our sins are literally transferred to the 
sufferer. Whereas it is plainly enough, as we just 
now saw in another example, a form of language 
generated by the scapegoat ceremony, where the priest 
confesses the sin of the people on the head of the 
goat, and he is driven off into the wilderness to sig- 
nify the deportation of the sin. The sin is not on the 
goat, the whole ceremony is vehicle, contrived to 
signify, as in form, simply God's deliverance of the 
people from their guilt. So when the Lord lays the 
iniquity of us all on the divine sufferer, deportation, 
deliverance, not punition, is the gist of the meaning. 
Another phase of the picture is brought forward, 
when the prophet says — " Yet it pleased the Lord to 
bruise him, he hath put him to grief." The Jewish 
habit was to refer every thing good and bad to God's 
will — " Is there evil in the city and the Lord hath 
done it ?" — and precisely how far the prophet would 
go in ascribing the "bruising" and the "grief" to 



172 GENERAL RESULTS ARRIVED AT 

God's will, in distinction from the wrong doing of 
wicked men, we may not be able to say, but if, in 
some sense, lie would charge it all to God's infliction, 
it does not follow that the infliction is judicial pen- 
alty ; for it can as well be penal-sanction suffering, as 
we certainly know that all other suffering in this world 
is. In the same verse again the prophet calls up a 
sacrificial image — " When thou shalt make his soul an 
offering for sin." But an offering for sin takes it 
away, never as being payment for it, but as being a 
token that expresses contrition ; in that way a litur- 
gical help to repentance — just that which Christ is to 
be, in a much higher and more competent way, in 
the sacrifice of his death. Once more we read — " he 
bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the 
transgressors." This word bare is not a word of 
punishment, but a word of burden; signifying the 
charge or load which a friend takes on him, in the 
woe or fall of another, by the stress of his own vica- 
rious concern for him. Thus God was declared to be 
afflicted in the affliction of his people, " and bear and 
carry them all the days of old." Thus also Paul 
exhorts the Galatians — " Bear ye one another's bur- 
dens, and so fulfill the law of Christ ;" meaning by 
the law of Christ the life, the manner, the spirit of 
Christ — in a word, the commandment. We come out 
thus, at the close of this wonderful chapter, chanting 
its liturgy of sorrow and vicarious passion, long ages 
before the Suffering Unknown Man appears ; having 
seen how the wrong, the curse, the penal blight, the 



IN THE CHAPTER. 173 

general simstamp marks every thing in the picture, 
and how lie, with it and not of it, ministers by Buffer- 
ing and blood to make intercession for the transgress- 
ors ; and yet we have come upon no token here of a 
judicial substitution, or a judicial suffering, or of any 
thing done for the satisfaction of justice in the pay- 
ment of its penalties. 

It only remains now to sum up the results arrived 

at, as regards the subject matter of the chapter. The 

law part of our coercive discipline was Results of the 

never expected to establish obedience argument. 

and righteousness by itself; neither was it expected 

to be a complete government by itself, letting no other 

means or method intervene to bring away from its 

condemnations, without first paying up its dues of 

penalty. On the contrary it was designed, from the 

first, to be joined with other means, working by other 

methods, and both together to make up the complete 

order of discipline for men ; which discipline is to be 

kept on foot with every man even to the last, no part 

of it being displaced by substitutional or compensatory 

agencies. One part never brings away from the other, 

and has of course no price to pay for release by the 

other, the common concern of both being how to 

fashion a character of perfect obedience and righteous 

liberty. At first the law and its enforcing agency 

has greater prominence in the discipline, and appears 

to be less conspicuously helped by the attractive and 

gracious powers that are to operate conjunctively with 

15* 



174 GENERAL RESULTS ARRIVED AT 

it. These are the good inspirations of public history, 
the great acts and characters of righteous men, the 
bounties and beautiful things of the world, the bless- 
ings of health and family and property, great escapes 
and deliverances from peril, the festivals and rites of 
religion, the hymns of the temple worship and the 
word of the prophets, all working with the law as 
gracious and softening influences, to raise up fear into 
love, and obedience into liberty. These and such as 
these were the powers that went before, to represent 
Christ in the discipline, down to the time of his full 
appearing ; and then from that time on, the discipline 
begins to seem rooted almost wholly in him and his 
glorious overshadowing personality. The legal as- 
spect is now no longer prominent, and the law ap- 
pears to be fulfilling itself in the commandment. 
The discipline we called coercive, takes on the look of a 
saving power, and we call it a gospel of salvation. 
We find a full competence in it now to the mastery 
of sin. The motivities of the law, acting always- 
by appeals to self-regard, operate strongly by 
the vice of their very . nature, to fasten the bad 
state of sin, and make it a state of thrall. That 
death-fall, that collapse of possibility, by which 
man is so fatally broken, as regards any gathering 
up of himself into good, is even made more hope- 
less, or at least scarcely more hopeful, by the pres- 
sure of mere legal enforcement, for the fault of it 
is that the motivities and the man are on the death- 
side of sin together. It can press the subject on, but 



IN THE CHAPTER. 175 

it can not draw him off. What is wanted here is a new 
motivity, inspirational in its nature, spontaneous, and 
free. And therefore it is that Christ comes over into 
our discipline from his own divine side, and brings his 
everlasting liberties with him. So that being incar- 
nated into and dying into our world-discipline with us, 
his glorious and sublime personality overtops every 
thing in it and us beside. He can show us, and does, 
how liberty can even die, and he gives it as our 
tender call of brotherhood to die with him, into his 
liberty. For now, and by our faith in his person or 
transcendent personality, we both die and live, and the 
mastery of our sin is complete. The abstract, tabu- 
lated law is fulfilled and crowned in the personal com- 
mandment. 

Equally true it would be, at the same time, if we 
should invert all this, and say that the law itself is 
made personal by the insertion of the Christly love 
and feeling into it. We are wont to imagine, and are 
all the while saying, that it is the sin of sin to be 
taking down the authority of law ; and we sometimes 
think of it as a hard, non-elastic and frangible pil- 
lar, flawed and broken, which can no way be repaired, 
and can only be replaced on payment, by something 
different ; whereas all the grand authority it had, and 
more, is made good by the tonic life and sovereign 
vigor of the cross. It is as if the tables of the ten com- 
mandments themselves, after Moses threw them down, 
were mended by passover blood sprinkled on them. 
So when Christ dies into the law, it becomes itself 



176 GENERAL RESULTS ARRIVED AT, ETC 



commandment written out in blood and sacrifice ; as 
much more sovereign over human hearts and con- 
sciences as it is more thoroughly personal, and having 
an authority from the cross which no thunder of Sinai 
could impress. 

It is not our conclusion then, that the command- 
ment takes away from the law, or the law from the 
commandment, but that they mutually endow and 
uphold each other ; locked together in a complete 
whole that is one and indivisible. God, we say, never 
made any so great misfit in a plan as to organize a 
great first half of it, that he must somehow, any how, 
at any cost, get rid of, before he could bring it on to 
success. That is not his way. On the contrary his 
beginning will reach through to his end, and the law 
and law-sanctions, never abated or bought off, will be 
working faithfully on, with all the gracious powers and 
tender motivities in Christ — part and parcel with 
them, in the one comprehensive purpose ; even as the 
lightnings and the dews take part, together in the 
growth of the world. 



CHAPTER III. 

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 

We most properly begin our, discussion of this great 
subject at the text of Scripture whence, in a sense, it 
has its own beginning — " Whom God hath set forth to 
be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to declare 
his righteousness, for the remission of sins that are 
past, through the forbearance of God ; to declare, I 
say, at this time his righteousness, that he might be just, 
and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus."* 

The first clause of the passage respecting propitia- 
tion has been expounded already in the chapter given 
on that subject. Our present concern is with the 
latter clause, relating to the alleged declaring of God's 
righteousness and the purpose or intent of it. 

The " declaring " here intended is not so much a 
declaring in words, but more in a way of manifesta- 
tion ; as by the facts and acts of Christ's Rom. Hi, 25-6, 
incarnate ministry, considered as the how understood, 
revelation made of his divinely great character, which 
is itself the righteousness of God. The original word 
for the declaring is in-showing, endeixis, that which, 
being displayed inwardly, begets an inward impres- 

* Rom. iii, 25-6. 

(177) 



178 THE SCRIPTURE WORDS 

sion. It is more important, however, rightly to con- 
ceive what the declaring, or in-showing, is for ; viz., 
that when God's excellence is declared, it will both 
show us how, and why, he was able to overlook, or 
pass by, the sins of past ages which he suffered in so 
great forbearance ;* and how, as respects the sins of 
this present time, he is able to be " just " enough, that 
is great enough, in the power of his "righteousness" 
to make righteous him that believeth — every one, that 
is, whose heart is opened by faith to the possible recep- 
tion of* his character. For this, if we rightly under- 
stand our word, is what justification signifies. It is 
that which takes away our condemnation ; setting us 
in confidence with God, by setting God in upon us, in 
such transforming power that we become new-char- 
actered from his righteousness. 

If now it should seem that I put a strain of hard 
practice on these words " just " and " justify," when 
Our confusion I convert them in this manner to 
of words. "righteous" and "make righteous," it 
must be enough to answer, that the hard strain came 
long time ago, when the " righteous " and " make 
righteous" were displaced by "just and justify," 
and torn away from their natural kinsman " righteous- 
ness," in the beginning of the sentence. By a most 
singular fatality it has come to pass, in this manner, in 
our English version, that where the Greek Testament 
gives us three words, noun, adjective, and verb, 
dikaisosune, dilcaios, and dilaiounta — all of one root, 

* Yid. Tholuck in loco. 



AND THEIR MEANING. 179 

we have two sets of words in the English to represent 
them ; one from the Saxon, righteousness, and two 
from the Latin, just and justify. Whence it results 
that as the Latin words justitia, Justus, &c, have two 
sets of meanings ; a legal or judicial, as pertaining to 
the penal redress of crimes, and a moral, as relating 
wholly to character ; the two nationalities of tongue in 
our English version throw us into a jumble of am- 
biguities, where we have as good chance of mental 
confusion as the worst enemy of truth could desire. 

I really wish it were possible to be rid of these 
Latin-born terms ; for that syllable jus puts us think- 
ing inevitably of something done for law and justice, 
and gravitating always downward on ideas simply 
political; when we perfectly know, or may, that the 
Greek words translated by them have never any but 
some far-off reference to law and justice, even when 
applied to men, and much less can be expected to 
have when used as staple words, to signify the moral 
excellence, or holiness, or righteousness of God, set 
forth to quicken righteousness in us, and beget in us 
a character graciously derivative from his. Plainly 
enough there is no such quickening, reproductive 
power in justice. 

This very strange anomaly of our English version 
even challenges attention from the scholars now en- 
gaged in a version of our scriptures. There probably 
is not another version in the world that does not 
translate these three words all by words of the same 
stock, and it is a verbal wrong and corruption of 



180 THE SCRIPTURE WORDS 

learning not to do it. Thus even Luther, whose 
theology, at this point, bore a stamp of legalism so 
decisive, translates nevertheless — " declare the right- 
eousness," " that he may be righteous," and " make 
righteous " — gerechtigTceit, gerecht sei, and gerecht mache-. 
The Douay and other French versions, following natur- 
ally the Yulgate, read justice, just and justify. And 
it is also a fair question whether it would not be 
better for us to get all our three words from the Latin 
instead of retaining our present very absurd mixture. 
For it will be seen that the expression " to declare the 
justice of God " would then have to be expounded so 
as to carry only the moral idea of righteousness ; when 
of course the other two words would naturally follow 
the lead which the first has given. 

It is, in fact, the sense of our Scripture that all these 
words are to have a moral, never a forensic, or judi- 
cial, significance. For in the Old Testament the noun 
is translated righteousness, times without number, and 
when translated justice, as it is twenty-five times, it 
is justice always in the sense of righteousness. The 
adjective is also translated righteous on almost every 
page, and just, always in the moral sense, about fifty 
times. There may sometimes be a semblance of judi- 
cial meaning in the translations of the verb, but the 
semblance even is commonly doubtful. The Hebrew 
has a causative mood for the verb, called the Hiphil, 
and our principal question here relates to the meaning 
under that mood, as in the word justify — i. e., just- 
make, or cause to be just, or pass as being just. Is 



AND THEIR MEANING. 181 

it this judicially, or morally, as if it were to 
righteous-make, or cause to be righteous ? " Turn 
many to righteousness," is the translation of Dan- 
iel's causative;* "justify many," the translation 
of Isaiah'sf — where the words translated are ex- 
actly the same. Plainly enough there is no thought 
here of the many being judicially acquitted, but 
in both cases only of their being made, or caused 
to be righteous. In the New Testament the noun is 
always translated righteousness, never justice; the 
adjective, righteous about fifty times, and just about 
thirty, though never in the judicial sense, unless it be 
in the text we have under examination; the verb is 
always translated to justify, because we have no other 
causative or Hiphil word in English, to fill the place. 
But who can imagine that these two latter words just 
and justifier are intended to be taken away from their 
family relation with righteousness in the very same 
sentence, and made to carry a different and more legal 
meaning? There was never such an example of bad 
writing in the world. 

Perhaps it is too much to expect that the three 
words here in question will ever be substituted by 
three words in the same root-rela- No relief truth 
tion. In that case what appears to must consent to 
be the unquestionable truth of our in- h er disadvantage. 
terpretation must consent to hold a place of disad- 
vantage and maintain itself, unsteadied by the scrip- 
ture help it would have from a more homogeneous 

* Daniel xii, 3. f Isaiah liii, 11. 

16 



182 NO POSSIBILITY OF A 

translation. Probably, however, no very great detri- 
ment would be suffered if due care were always taken 
to understand the words just and justify, as having, 
like the word righteousness that precedes, a purely 
moral significance — that God is just as being righteous, 
and justifies simply as communicating his own char- 
acter, and becoming thus a righteousness upon us. 
Hitherto this caution has not been observed by 
theologians, and the words have been very commonly 
construed by them under the judicial analogies. In- 
deed, the very clause, thus commonly abused, is con- 
tinually cited as authority to show that it ought to be ! 
Does it not read " that he might be just ?" — just, that 
is, and yet the justifier, because he has so exactly sat- 
isfied the immutable justice by his sufferings! How 
can a text of scripture keep its balance when it is 
already overset by the bad theology it has created 
under its bad interpretation, wanting still the bad in- 
terpretation to keep itself alive ? The prospect in this 
view, that any concurrent interpretation will some- 
how be reached, is at least remote. As Protest- 
ants we very generally agree that there is a gospel 
truth which is fitly to be called justification by faith. 
We acknowledge it even commonly, to be the articulus 
stantis vel cadentis ecclesice ; but as yet we have only a 
semblance of agreement in it. Some deny it alto- 
gether as they think, who yet more practically believe 
in it than others who maintain it. "We do not agree 
as to what the justification means, and we differ as 
much as to what is the meaning of the faith. Great 



LEGAL JUSTIFICATION.. 183 

multitudes accept the doctrine only to fight for it as 
an idol of sectarian opinion. A wiser and more truly 
christian multitude find their heart's rest in it, and are 
in it as the. peace and liberty of God. Of these latter, 
too, many who have learned to believe more academ- 
ically and scholastically than is convenient, give it 
still a form in their doctrine, which is not the truth 
discovered in their hearts, and make a church article 
of it, as Luther himself did, which is only impossible 
and revolt in o\ 

ISTow this remarkable want of agreement is largely 
due, as I conceive, to the impossible problem almost 
always on hand ; viz., to make out a Legal justifica- 
rational statement of what in fact does tlon im P osslble - 
not exist, a justification that stands in the satisfaction of 
God's law and justice. I propose, accordingly, to open 
the discussion at this point ; removing if possible the 
false assumption referred to. The law, it is conceived, 
must be satisfied, or the penalties must be satisfied, else 
there is no possibility of deliverance ; for God will be 
false to his law and justice, if he does not somehow 
provide what makes the release of transgression con- 
sistent with the honors of his government. Christ 
therefore has contributed in penal suffering, we are 
told, what exactly compensates the law, or evens the 
score of justice ; so that he who believes may be justified 
— legally justified. Or according to another scheme 
which is different, and is called the governmental 
scheme, God's justice will consist in the expression 
made by his penalties of his hatred or abhorrence to 



184 NO POSSIBILITY OF A 

sin ; which expression he is bound to make, but is al- 
lowed to make without penalty when he may, does in 
fact make in the suffering of Christ ; for this suffering 
is only so far in the nature of penalty as to yield the 
requisite equal expression of abhorrence. The law is 
satisfied, not by a substitution of suffering for suffering, 
but of one expression of abhorrence for another ; al- 
lowing thus, it is imagined, a large economy in the pen- 
alty to be exacted. The invention is rather ingenious, 
but has no complexion of authority in the Scripture. 
Whatever may be thought of it. the problem it under- 
takes is so far the same as the satisfaction scheme pro- 
poses ; viz., to find how a legal justification could be, 
and was, provided. 

Xow this legal justification, coming in one way or 

the other, is completely made up, as we may see, be- 

Justified be- f° re a ^ repentances ; for the law is sat- 

fore faith in this isfied, the punishment accepted, either 

ega way. j n .^ p a | ns or ^ s adequate expression 

of justice, and the sinner is, at least, so far justified, 
that his account stands even. He certainly is either 
justified or not, and it makes very little difference 
which ; for if we imagine that he has only a ground 
of justification made ready, waiting the condition 
precedent of faith, there is no faith waited for in the 
ground as such, that can do any good. There is no 
transforming efficacy in the faith of any mere fact, and 
the more implicitly one believes in the ground, that 
is, in the even score of his transgression, the less likely 
is he to be concerned for any thing farther, or to be- 



LEGAL JUSTIFICATION. 185 

lieve in any tiling better. Is not justice satisfied ? is not 
the law satisfied ? What concern then shall he have 
for these, when they are in fact gone by, and never 
can be set up again for uses and retributive proceed- 
ings in any future time or world ? What is wanted 
now is no mere credence for a fact, but a faith that is 
faith, and the ground so called is only a hindrance or 
impediment. For the faith that is faith will believe, 
not in that, but in a person ; viz., Christ the righteous, 
passing over the soul to him. It is such a faith 
as yields the soul trustfully up to his pure life and 
all-transforming grace of sacrifice, and such, in that 
manner, as becomes a new-sprung life in the righteous- 
ness of God. But such a faith the supposed ground 
does not meet or match ; one is not for the other ; and 
if the transgressor imagines that he is justified on the 
score of the ground, he might as well be justified be- 
fore the faith as after it, for the ground only helps 
him to be at peace in his sins, and his faith in the 
ground still leaves him there. 

It is another fault of this legally grounded justi- 
fication that it consents by definition to a really ap- 
palling fiction, proposing to justify 01* The appalling 

pass the subject, not as being just, but fiction. 

as if he were just, when confessedly he is not. Which 

makes the justification only so far real that it excuses 

the law, when it does not excuse or any way approve 

the man. Or if the man himself is justified, as we 

continually hear, and not the law excused, there is 

then no longer any place left for forgiveness. Indeed 

16* 



186 NO POSSIBILITY OF A 

the man himself would take a singular liberty, in 
asking God's forgiveness for what he has already 
justified. We find him stranded thus in fact between 
two fictions ; a forgiveness that has no opportunity, 
and a justification that has no truth. Is it any won- 
der, when a double fiction is thus let in at the center 
point of our gospel, there should be some lack of 
integrity in the life and practice of its disciples ? 

And there is yet another fiction set upon the doctrine, 
before it is finished, that is even worse and farther of! 
Another from any real truth. As it is agreed 
fiction. ^ a |. ^ e i aw re q U i res a perfect right- 
eousness, nothing is justification which does not bring 
the perfect righteousness. Then it follows, the theolo- 
gians tell us, that any thing is to be considered a 
righteousness which answers the demand of the law, 
and as Christ suffers in penalty what exactly answers 
the law, he is fairly said to provide us a righteousness. 
And then, if we look into the righteousness so called 
to find what is in it, we discover that the term a 
righteousness means no righteousness at all, but only 
that Christ contributes penal suffering enough to 
make us free of the law under sin, even as if we had 
not sinned, or were perfectly righteous. So far it is 
just as good as a righteousness, but, alas ! how little 
does that mean ! Our fall, our loss of righteousness, 
our dreadful hell of character — over this we are now 
allowed to lay the plaster called a righteousness! 
A righteousness that is in fact mere suffering, and 
as far as the mode of the fact is concerned, has 



LEGAL JUSTIFICATION. 187 

nothing to do with righteousness at all, but only with 
providing a way of safety for unrighteousness. A 
theologic invention more dreadful than this, it is 
difficult to conceive. It was not invented as a fraud 
— I have no such thought — but the integrities of 
righteous living are of necessity broken and badly 
corrupted by it. It is a gospel which represents a 
mere pay-bill in penal suffering, set forth and com- 
manded to be preached as being an actual gift of 
righteousness. If it seems to be a ground for hypoc- 
risy instead of justification, the intention we are sure 
is not as bad as the look. 

It is only an extension of the charges I am making 
in this line that the christian state of justification, 
when based in the faith of a mere legal satisfaction 
for sin, is a really ignoble matter in the Tbe j us tifi ca - 
experience, sordid and low in its tion itself is 
motive, rising scarcely, if at all above lgno e ' 
the level of a jail-delivery transaction. The trans- 
gressor has learned that his penal account is made, 
even. Whereupon he congratulates himself that he 
is now safe, and need no more be troubled in his con- 
fidence ; for the justification Christ has bought for 
him before the law, makes him free of the law, and 
what more can he want ? His faith is in a mere polit- 
ical law-work that he has taken for his gospel, and 
has nothing in it that belongs to the noble confidence 
of justification in its true christian idea. For to be 
" made righteous " in the righteousness of God, which 
Christ declared by his death, is to receive him in such 



188 NO POSSIBILITY OF A 

manner, by faith in his person, as to let in the inspira- 
tion force of his transcendent life and character ; a 
matter how different, how grandly free, how unselfish- 
ly great, lifting the human experience up into ranges 
how consciously divine. I do not say, be it observed, 
that where the justified man supposes and believes 
in a doctrine of satisfaction rigidly legal, his expe- 
rience will of course be graded as low as his doctrine. 
He will have sentiments often that are less prudential 
than his faith, and will be more frequently quickened 
by the righteousness of God than he ought to be. I 
only say that his doctrine itself ranges low, and, as far 
as it operates, will have a chilling and degrading effect 
in his experience. His legal justification state is bad, 
working only incapacity and detention. 

Rehearsing these objections to any and all schemes 
of legal justification, it is a most happy sign for my 
doctrine, in the chapters on Propitiation and The Law, 
that they make room for no such doctrine, and leave 
us no conceivable want of it. By the law, as there 
conceived, we are only held in terms of penal disci- 
pline and not of desert or vindicatory justice, and the 
discipline is satisfied never, save when it is fulfilled, or 
consummated in a character deifically righteous. As 
the trial goes on we suffer scorches of law, and twinges 
of condemnatory pain, but our lacerations are meas- 
ured by no principle of desert. They are not meant 
for justice, but to work conjunctively always with 
revelations of goodness and love concerned to win our 
obedience. These revolutions in the cross and its ar- 



LEGAL JUSTIFICATION. 189 

guments of mercy, do not undertake to master the law 
for us and pluck us out of its hands, as if it were a 
beast of prey, but they join hands with it, and give it 
welcome as a power working with them, in the same re- 
generative purpose, even when it worketh chastisement. 
All thoughts of a legal justification are, in this view, 
out of place, we can make no account of it. The 
wrath to come is by supposition yet future, and the 
dispensation of justice is not yet arrived. Nothing 
penal mixes with our discipline, only so far as it will 
help our recovery. Of course there will be scars of 
wrong defacing us, poisons of disease circulating 
through us, disproportions and disorders stealing in, so 
that if we pass out of life unconformed to God, these 
will be carried on as bad causations with us, to begin 
the new state of justice. And it will be a state em- 
phatically new, making distributions henceforth in the 
scale of desert. For such a state there is of course no 
justification there. Only the bad causations can be 
called off here and taken quite away by what is fitly 
called " the justification of life ;" that which heals all 
scars, extracts all poisons, tunes all discords and disord- 
ers in harmony, because it is a being entered into the 
righteousness of God, where the soul is new-charac- 
tered in the hie and character of God. 

I. 

Thus far I have been occupied mainly with matters 
negative. I now pass on to verify the doctrine already 
vindicated, and very plainly asserted in the passage 
from the epistle to the Eomans, at which this dis- 



190 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

(Mission began ; viz., that the true christian justification is 
that which makes righteous. 

If Christianity, or the christian Scripture, has any- 
thing to boast, it is that it proves its grand superiority, 
Consider the and shows the manifest seal of God's 
word righteous, inspirations, in having given to the world 
far back, in advance of all other literature, this most 
noble, stately, intellectually massive name for charac- 
ter ; viz., Bighteousness. We have other words in 
the scripture and ont of the scripture, built on differ- 
ent symbols, that answer well many of the requisite 
uses of morality or moral obligation, and sometimes 
of religion, but none that carry the distinctions of 
character with equal force and sharpness. Law is a 
word more nearly political and parliamentary, and 
better for a legal virtue than a free. Obedience sup- 
poses some other nature in a superior relation of 
authority, which leaves no room, save by a large ac- 
commodation, for its application to God. Justice [Lat- 
in, justitia] was even a more favorite moral word than 
rectitudo among the Romans because of their intensely 
legal character, but the forensic and judicial habit of 
the word associates always a false element, when it is 
applied to moral uses. Goodness is a word truly divine, 
when used by one who is in a spiritual habit, but it 
will be observed that unreligious minds are always 
sinking it to things done with generosity only, or out 
of a merely kind disposition. Love is the popular 
word of scripture obligation, partly because it has the 
disadvantage of being only a word of the affections. 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 191 

demanding always some intellectual word to sharpen 
its applications, and be a regulative standard of its 
measures, times, and occasions. Higher than all these, 
and least ambiguous, and sharpest in the moral ring 
of it, is right or righteousness. The other flags require 
holding, all of them, but this can hold itself. A 
right line is the most inflexible of all symbols, and 
having this central image of necessary meaning in it, 
corrupt uses can not warp it ; still it stands to its in- 
tegrity as the plainly divine, visibly eternal, word for 
character ; declaring with Solomon, " Let thine eyes 
look right on, and thine eyelids look straight before 
thee ;"- where — it may not be amiss to mention the 
fact — this word straight is represented in the Sep- 
tuagint by the Greek word dilcaia. What then but a 
first interest plainly of the world does Christ fulfill, in 
" declaring " by his death " the righteousness of 
God?" 

We think it may be that we are just now coming 
at the fuller and more complete ethical development 
of this w T ord right, having it for our conclusion, 
scientifically fixed and generally accepted, that moral 
obligation is grounded psychologically in the one 
necessary idea, or absolute law, of right ; a conclusion 
which, whether one observes it or not, only brings out 
our supposed science upon the old scripture standard, 
which resolves all true character into right living, or 
righteousness. We can see too for ourselves what im- 
mense advances of thought have been made in this 



* Pro v. iv. 25. 



192 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

direction, by simply adverting to the times of Plato 
Plato reporting and the studies of right, or justice, 
Socrates. which he and his Great Master have 
given us. "Justice" [dilcaiosunt] "is the virtue of 
the soul," he says, " injustice the vice. The just soul 
then and the just man will live well."* Speaking 
also from his merely conscious experience, and not by 
speculation, he reports a certain harmonic order in 
the soul, when it is in righteousness, as if there were 
some hidden tuning power in it, producing " a correct 
arrangement of the parts towards each other, or about 
each other." But when he comes to the reporting of 
Socrates in his scientific debate of right or justice, 
he reports him frankly confessing that he is strangely 
mystified, or even balked by the problem. This 
autocratic, all-piercing, indivertible idea, coming down 
upon all mind and making all thought quiver to its 
touch, whence comes it ? and what is it 1 and whither 
is it going ? " Well," he says, " my excellent friend, if 
all this be true I still want to know what is justice 
\i. e. right]. Thereupon they think that I ask tiresome 
questions, and am leaping over the barriers, and have 
been already sufficiently answered, and they try to 
satisfy me with one question after another, and at 
length they quarrel. - For one of them says that 
justice is the sun [sun of righteousness ?] and that he 
only is the piercing or burning element which is the 
guardian of nature. And when I joyfully repeat this 
beautiful notion, I am answered by the satirical 

* Republic JAh. I., Cap. xxiv, 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 193 

remark: 'What! is there no justice in the world, 
when the sun is down V And when I earnestly beg 
my questioner to tell me his own honest opinion, he 
says, ' Fire in the abstract ;' but that is not very in- 
telligible. Another says, ' No, not fire in the ab- 
stract, but the abstraction of heat in the fire.' 
Another man professes to laugh at all this, and says, 
with Anaxagoras, that justice is soul [whose ?] for 
soul, has absolute power, and mixes with nothing, and 
orders all things, and passes through all things. At 
last, my friend, I find myself in greater perplexity 
about justice [right] than I was before I began to 
learn."* 

Dear great Master, bow far off is he in these af- 
fecting mystifications, and half- worshipful homages, 
from any solution of this mighty word ! Only this is 
clear, that he finds no reference in it to judicial anal- 
ogies. "What appears to almost take away his breath 
is the deific mystery of emphasis in it; Psychological 
commanding from behind all curtains results. 
and pillars of the creation ; a causality every where 
hid, yet every where visible ; the sun that makes in- 
ternal witness night and day ; fire without combustion 
always felt ; mind undiscovered but pronouncing itself 
in the silences of thought ; a mystery to be always 
debated, and yet in deepest amazement obeyed ! 
Truly these two thousand years and more of debate 
have brought us over long reaches of distance, to 
settle us on the basis of morality we now commonly 

* Cratjdus. 
17 



194 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

think we have established ; viz., everlasting right ; a 
mere idea, that, in being simply thought, gets author- 
ity to command the world ! 

And yet all these advances were practically, though 
not psychologically, given us, full another thousand 
Abraham before or fifteen hundred years before the time 
Socrates. f j§ crates himself, by the word of 
our ancient scripture. Far back. of Plato and the 
Greek philosophy, back of the seige of Troy, back of 
the story of the Argonauts, either back of the times, 
or in the times, when the Aryan tribes and Yedic 
singers were pasturing their cows on the plains of the 
East Country, our Bible scripture shows us Abraham, 
the grand herdsman father, expostulating sharply 
with God, as if citing the categorical imperative to 
soften his undue severity — "Shall not the Judge of 
all the earth do right?"* However we can see a 
little way back, that Abraham is not talking here 
in the strain at all of the school ethics, but more as if 
the softening touch of some divine evangelism were 
upon him. He has come forth, as we see, out of the 
Chaldee country, leavened with a more than moral, 
a grandly religious, training in the Righteousness of 
God. Others too are in the same, for he finds in the 
!N~ew West a priest of the Most High God, Melchize- 
dek, whose very name shows that he is called by his 
countrymen, after the principle itself of the religion 
he ministers, Melchizedek, i. e., King of Righteousness, f 
And then, as if to signify that he is in the secret, 

* Gen. xviii, 25. f Gen. xiv, 18. 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 195 

whether lie knows it or not, of some divine evangelism 
going before upon him, he is put down as the King of 
Salem too ; that is, King of Peace ; where we find 
him in the very same conjunction of ideas that belong 
to christian justification. And the people and 
prophets coming after, warm their souls in the same ; 
as Isaiah, for example, when he writes — " And the 
work of righteousness shall be peace ; and the effect 
of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever."* 
Which conjunction again is noted as a properly 
christian coincidence by the Epistle to the Hebrews — 
" First being by interpretation king of righteousness, 
and after that also king of Salem, which is king of 
peace." Now this may seem to be altogether fanciful, 
as every thing said of Melchizedek is wont to be ; but, 
observe, I say not a word of the person of Melchize- 
dek, as to who he is, or whence he comes, or what his 
relations to the christian future may be — for it really 
makes no difference whatever — I simply find the two 
words that are elemental in the experience of justifi- 
cation set religiously together somehow, it matters not 
how, and upon that fact I hang the conclusion that 
righteousness is already become the word for holy 
character. Abraham brought it from the East, and 
found it also in the West. And if now we add, 
what will by and by appear more fully and partly as 
an article of reason, that the being made righteous in 
the righteousness of Gocl, is a truth as old as the 
world, and applicable to all moral natures in 
* Isaiah xxxii, 17. 



196 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

it, we shall have how little reason left to apprehend 
something fanciful in this conjunction of words, that 
we know we find among our antiquities, and that 
bring us out their ideas in the easy way of silence, and 
covertly as it were from themselves. It will not ap- 
pear that there is any such putting forward of right- 
eousness as a standard of character, in the nearly con- 
temporary literature of the Aryan people, which, if it 
be as old as our scripture, or even older, has no 
name or definite conception for God, and which I do 
not find, by my restricted and rather second-hand 
knowledge, to have any rugged and rigidly deter- 
minate notion of duty, such as we name by the word 
righteousness. 

But our scripture revelation does not stop in the 
antiquities of Genesis ; but marks two other great ad- 

n a a i a vances to be distinctly noted. In the 

God declared J 

as the spring of first it shows all holy character in men 
righteousness in ^ fa a g race derivative from the right- 
eousness of God. Thus we have the 
Psalmist singing out his blessed promise even before 
the days of Homer — " He shall receive the blessing 
from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his 
salvation."* And the prophets coming after echo and 
re-echo the same inspiring hope; one protesting 
" This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, 
and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord ;"f 
and again, " he hath covered me with the robe of 
righteousness ; for as the garden causeth the things 

f Isaiah liv, 17. 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 197 

that are in it to spring forth, so the Lord will cause 
righteousness and praise to spring forth before all 
nations ;"* another, by a certain unmatched boldness 
of thought that comprehends all that is highest in 
God as the eternal source and fund of character, de- 
claring, " this is the name whereby he shall be called, 
The Lord our Righteousness ;"f another declaring 
Christ in his grand prerogative as Redeemer — " and 
to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring in 
everlasting righteousness. "J These wonderful scrip- 
tures, presenting God as the causative power of right- 
eousness in all mortal natures, have only a sound of 
unmeaning jingle, I know, to many, the repetition 
of them does not even move respect. And the reason 
is that w T e have put them for long ages to a theologic 
use so mechanical and hollow that the living sense of 
them is dead. God undertakes in them, how visibly, 
to kindle the hope in us of a glorious new character 
from himself — which we, alas, conceive only to mean 
that he has bought us off from the punishment of 
our sins ! — having provided us a righteousness. 

Descending to the New Testament, we have the 
Saviour himself testifying in his very first sermon — 
" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness for they shall be filled. "§ He does not say, 
observe, they that hunger and thirst after a righteous- 
ness, but after righteousness. And again he declares 
at this earliest moment of his ministry — " Seek 
ye first the kingdom of God and his righteous- 

* Isaiah lxi, 10, 11. f Jer. xxiii, 6. % Dan - ^i 24 - § Matth. v, G. 

17* 



198 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

ness."* A most bold thought to put in any mortal 
mind that it is to seek the righteousness itself of 
God! Accordingly his new dispensation is called 
the ministration of righteousness,! and that,too, plainly 
in the sense of justification, because it antagonizes 
and quells, when embraced, the ministration of con- 
demnation. To the same point comes another declar- 
ation ; that " now the righteousness of God without 
the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law 
and the prophets, even the righteousness of God 
which is by faith in Jesus Christ unto all and upon 
all them that believe.";); It is not, observe, a grace of 
penal suffering for, but a grace of righteousness unto 
and upon all them that believe. Hence the call of 
our salvation is " to yield our members instruments 
of righteousness unto God, "§ as if nothing now were 
necessary to put us fully in God's character but to 
yield our whole nature believingly up to his all trans- 
forming righteousness. Thus when God has all our 
faculties offered up together to the harmonizing power 
of his righteousness, and to inspired co-working 
with it, they will be instruments discoursing only 
music from that time forth. 

What I am here advancing then under this head is 
the fact of a grand, stock character in God, that has 
been and is to be fore verm ore the spring of all char- 
acter in his believing people. Thus it was long be- 
fore any one ever had a thought of the possible satis- 
fying of God's law and justice, by a contribution of 

* Mattk. vi, 33. f 2 Cor. iii, 9. \ Rom. iii, 21-22. § Rom. vi, 13. 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 199 

pains to fill the legal quota of transgression, that 
Abraham, believing God in the promise of an heir, 
had the faith counted unto him for righteousness. 
Simply because every one brought home to God in 
such a way of faith, passes into God, so to speak, and 
is hid and covered and charactered in all action by 
his righteousness. 

But a higher, finer point is finally reached, or finally 
will be, in. the scripture development of this ideal 
standard. We are not only to have our righteousness 
derivatively from God, but God himself, as being its 
eternal source, will be in it, after a ^ ,, . , . 

God s righteous- 
Standard more perfect than we, to this ness and that of 

hour, have commonly been able to im- the market > dlt - 
agine. How seldom do we think it re- 
quires any thing above justice and equity and fair 
consideration. Whereas God would not be right or 
righteous to himself, if he could think it less than 
wrong to not make cost, or endure even a cross for his 
enemy. Hence the representation that his Son is set 
forth to be a propitiation, because righteousness or 
right conviction — the eternal law before government 
— required it of him. Whence it follows, in a reverse 
order, that the blood and sacrifice of his Son declare 
" the righteousness of God in the forgiveness of sins." 
All this " that he may be righteous," not just in the 
retributive sense as our version is supposed to repre- 
sent, " but righteous " — and have it seen that for right- 
eousness' sake, lie will forgive at bloody cost ; so to 
new-character in righteousness him that believeth in 



200 THE TRUE JUSTIFICATION IS 

Jesus. And how beautifully is the conception borne 
out, in the words of apostolic epithet under which he 
is presented — " Jesus Christ the righteous?'* He is 
called the righteous, observe, as if this were somehow 
the most emphatic and principally distinctive desig- 
nation of his person. And that the epithet is used 
with a deliberate reference to the cross and the sacri- 
fice for sin, is plainly seen from the words preceding ; 
" we have an advocate with the Father ;" as if he were 
" the righteous " in that very grace itself. The same 
thing also we have once more in the same epistle — 
" he is faithful and just," [that is righteous] " to forgive 
us our sins." Where the unhappy translation, just, 
really mocks the significance of the words ; for who 
will imagine that God is faithful to forgive sins be- 
cause he is forensically just ? What, in fact, are we 
shown all the while with so great stress of misbegot- 
ten argument, as that God can not forgive sins 
without something done to satisfy his justice and take 
it out of the way ? Here then it is that we behold 
the sublime peak of obligation where true righteous- 
ness culminates ; viz., that it is to be fulfilled, and can 
be, only by sacrifice. Righteousness and sacrifice are 
even relative ideas. That Christ himself had this im- 
pression is sufficiently clear from his promise of the 
Spirit coming to reprove the world of righteousness, be- 
cause his death will have taken him home now to the 
Father to be seen no more. The pure great image 
of the righteousness of God, will now be discovered 

* 1 John ii, 1. 



TO MAKE RIGHTEOUS. 201 

in his reascension to the Father, showing plainly that 
he is not a being of this world. 

How different a matter now is the justification 
that comes of justice satisfied, from this over- 
spreading, all-assuring character in the Legal justifica- 
righteousness of God. One believes in tion cold and 
the cold-iron click of the turnkey open- poor * 
ing his door; the other in the sunrise and the soft- 
glowing, free-breathing radiance of the morning — 
always to rise and glow and breathe and be fresh 
morning for the soul's high liberty. And how strong- 
ly cast the contrast is we all discover, in the shock of 
incongruity it gives us to simply substitute justice for 
righteousness in the scripture uses. We can not read 
"sacrifices of justice" — "justice from the God of his 
salvation " — " the Lord our justice " — " Blessed are 
they that hunger and thirst after justice for they shall 
be filled " — " so by the justice of one the free gift 
came on all " — " the justice of God which is by faith 
of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that be- 
lieve " — " much more doth the ministration of justice 
exceed in glory " — " new heavens and new earth 
wherein dwelleth justice;" indeed there is scarcely a 
passage, I know not one, in the Old and New Testa- 
ment, that will not groan almost audibly when the 
word justice is stuck upon it as the synonym of right- 
eousness. So clear it is that any. proper and true 
justification is a state renewed in righteousness — that 
and nothing else. 

Two other points concerning justification still re- 



202 JUSTIFICATION IS THE NORMAL 

main, the presentation of which could not well be 
intermixed with the largely scriptural and verbal dis- 
cussion of its nature just now closed. And first of 
all it needs to be observed, in order to a full under- 
standing of justification, that it comes in the divine 
idea not after sin as a fact or condition previous, but 
was to be unconditionally every where and forever. 
For according to the original normal state of being, 
God was to be a powder all diffusive, a central, self- 
radiating orb — Sun itself of Righteousness, shining 
abroad on all created minds and overspreading, 
them with the sovereign day of its own excellence. 
The plan never was that created beings should be 
righteous, in such a sense, by their own works, or 
their own inherent force, as not to be derivatively 
righteous and by faith. They had and were eternally 
to have, their righteousness in God. Remaining up- 
right, they would consciously have had their righteous- 
ness in God's inspirations, and would have been dis- 
turbed by a contrary suggestion. 

Hence the dismal incapacity of sin ; because it sepa- 
rates the soul from God's life-giving character and in- 
spirations. Having Him no more, as the fontal source 
of righteousness, it falls off into an abnormal, self-cen- 
tered state, where it comes under mere self-interest, 
and struggles vainly, if at all, in the tangle of that 
kind of endeavor to recover itself to its own ideals. 
"Works of the law, dead works carefully piled, will- 
works, works of supererogation, penances, alms, aus- 
terities of self-mortification — none of these, nor all of 



STATE OF BEING RESTOBED. 203 

them, make out the needed righteousness. Still there 
is a felt deficiency, which the apostle calls " a coming 
short of the glory of God." Nothing will suffice for 
this, but to come back, finite to infinite, creature to 
Creator, and take derivatively what, in its nature, 
must be derivative ; viz., the righteousness that was 
normally and forever to be, unto, and upon, all them 
that believe. 

Here then is the grand renewing -office and aim of 
the gospel of Christ. He comes to men groping in a 
state of separation from God, consciously not even 
with their own standards of good, and, what is more, 
consciously not able to be — self-condemned when they 
are trying most to justify themselves, and despairing 
the more, the more they endeavor to make them- 
selves righteous by their own works — to such Christ 
comes forth, out of the righteousness of God, and 
also in the righteousness of God, that he may be 
the righteousness of God upon all them that believe, 
and are so brought close enough to him in their faith, 
to receive his inspirations. And this is the state of 
justification, not because some debt is made even, by 
the penal suffering of Christ, but because that normal 
connection with God is restored by his sacrifice, which 
permits the righteousness of God to renew its ever- 
lasting flow. 

When I speak thus of the connection with God as 
being restored by the sacrifice of Christ, let me not 
be understood as meaning by the sacrifice, only what 
is tenderly sympathetic and submissive in Christ's 



204: JUSTIFICATION IS THE NORMAL 

death. I include all that is energetic, strong, and 
piercing ; his warnings, the pressure of his discipline, 
all that is done, by his powerful ministry and doctrine, 
to save us from the wrath to come. His sacrifice is 
no mere suit or plaint of weakness, for the righteous- 
ness of God is in' it. When the metallic ring of 
principle, or everlasting right, is heard in the distress 
and wail of the cross, the sacrifice becomes itself a 
sword of conviction, piercing irresistibly through the 
sinner, and causing him to quiver on the point 
by which he is fastened. Mere sympathy, as we 
commonly speak, is no great power ; it must be some- 
how a tremendous sympathy, to have the true divine 
efficacy. Hence the glorious justifying eificacy of 
Christ ; because the righteousness of God is declared 
in his sacrifice. 

Again, secondly, a more deliberate statement of the 
relations of faith to justification appears to be de- 
manded. Though the righteousness of God is de- 
Faith how re- c l are d an0 ^ made to shine with its true 
lated to justifica- divine lustre and glory by Christ, still 
tlon " the justification is not conceived to be 

an accomplished fact, as indeed it never can be, prior 
to faith in the subject. It is justification by faith 
and not without — " and the justifier of him that be- 
lieveth in Jesus." What is this faith, and why is it 
necessary ? 

It is not the belief that Christ has come to even our 
account with justice ; neither is it the belief that he 
has obtained a surplus merit, which is offered, over 



STATE OF BEING RESTORED. 205 

and above, as a positive righteousness, and set to our 
credit, if we will have it. Neither of the two is a 
fact, or at all credible any way. Nor w T ould both, 
if believed as mere facts, do any thing more for us 
than a belief in any other facts. Our sins do not fly 
away because we believe in a fact of any kind. We 
can even believe in all the historic facts of Christian- 
ity, as thousands do, without being any the more truly 
justified. 

No, the real faith is this, and very little intelligence 
is required to see the necessity of it ; viz., the trusting 
of one's self over, sinner to Saviour, to be in him, and 
of him, and new charactered by him ; because it is 
only in that way that the power of Christ gets oppor- 
tunity to work. So the sinner is justified, and the 
justification is a most vital affair ; " the Faith de- 
justification of life." The true account fined - 
of it is that Jesus, coming into the world, with all 
God's righteousness upon him, declaring it to guilty 
souls in all the manifold evidences of his life and pas- 
sion, wins their faith, and by that faith they are con- 
nected again with the life of God, and filled and over- 
spread with his righteousness. And there springs up, 
in this reconnection of the soul with God's righteous- 
ness, a perfect liberty and confidence ; for it is no 
more trying to climb up into a righteous consciousness 
and confidence by itself, but it has the righteousness 
by derivation ; flowing down upon it, into it, and 
through it, by the eternal permeation of God's 

Spirit. And just here it is that Christianitv wins 

18 



206 

its triumph. It shows man how to be free in good, 
and makes it possible. The best that all other reli- 
gions and moralities can do, is to institute a practice 
of works, and a climbing up into perfection by our 
own righteous deeds ; but the gospel of Jesus comes 
to our relief, in showing us how to find righteousness, 
and have it as an eternal inspiration ; " even the 
righteousness of God that is by the faith of Jesus 
Christ unto all and upon all them that believe."* In 
it we do not climb, but rest ; we goad ourselves into 
no impossibilities, groan under no bondage that we 
can not lift ; sink into no deep mires because we try 
to struggle out. We have a possible righteousness, 
because it is not ours but God's ; Christ received by 
our faith, to be upon us and for us, all that we could 
wish to be for ourselves. This is the transcendent dis- 
tinction, the practically sublime glory of our gospel, 
our great all- truth- — Justification by Faith. Here is 
conquered the grandest of all problems, how to put 
confidence in the bosom of guilt, and settle a platform 
of virtue that shall make duty free and joyful under 
all conscious disabilities. 

Here it was that Luther broke into ecstasy, and 
a great bewilderment of change that he could not, 

Luther's great f° r tne time, understand. He had been 
discovery of jus- trying to be justified by works ; that is, 
tification. "by fastings, penances, alms, vigils, wear- 

ing down the body under the load of his sins, and 
crying to God in his cell, day and night, for some de- 

* Rom. iii, 22. 



OF JUSTIFICATION. 207 

liverance that should ease the torment of his still and 
always self-condemning soul. A right word from 
Stairpitz let him see the fool that he was — that Christ 
would take him because he was guilty, having 
died for him because he was guilty, and not be- 
cause he was righteous. At that point broke in, what 
light and confidence ! His emancipated soul burst off 
all its chains in a moment, and took, as it were, the 
range of heaven in its liberty. He was new himself, 
the world was new, the gospel was new. It had not 
entered into his heart to conceive the things that were 
freely given him of God, but now he has them all at 
once. Justification by faith, justification by faith — 
his great soul is full of it ; he must preach it, he must 
fight for it, die for it, know nothing else. 

In the inspiration of this truth it was, that his great 
career as a reformer and spiritual hero began. If any 
thing will make a man a hero, it will be the righteous- 
ness Of God Upon him, and the COllfi- Luther's head 

dence he gets in the sense of it. If he did not under- 
can be eloquent for any thing, it will be stand his heart 
in the testimony of what Christ is to him, in the now 
glorified consciousness of his inward life. But we 
must not fall into a very great mistake here. Luther 
is, in fact, two, not one ; viz., a Christian, and a 
theologian ; and his Christian justification by faith, 
that which puts such a grand impulsion into his feel- 
ing, and raises the tone of his manhood to such a 
pitch of vigor, is a very different, altogether separate 
matter, from that theologic contriving of his head, 



208 OBJECTIONS STATED 

which lie took so confidently for the certain equiva- 
lent. Taking this latter, it would be difficult to find 
how any one should become much of a hero, or be 
lifted to the pitch of any great sentiment, in it. In- 
deed, the very great wonder is, that a man so intelli- 
gent should imagine, for a moment, that he was fired 
with a passion so mighty, and a joy so transcendent, 
by the fact that an innocent being had taken his sins, 
and evened the account of justice by suffering their 
punishment! This he thought he believed; but we 
are not obliged to believe that he did. Really be- 
lieving it, and conceiving what it means, the fact 
would have set his stout frame shuddering, and turned 
his life to gall. The truth indeed appears to be, that 
his heart sailed over his theology, and did not come 
down to see it. We find him contriving, in his 
" Epistle to the Galatians," how Christ, having all the 
sins of mankind imputed to him, " becomes the great- 
est transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, and 
blasphemer, that ever was, or could be, in all the 
world ;" and his doctrine is, that suffering the just 
wrath of God, for the sin that is upon him, Christ 
makes out a right of justification for us before God, 
which is complete, because it completely satisfies the 
law. And then to be just cleared of punishment, and 
believe that he is, he conceives to be the very thing 
that makes his glorious liberty and raises the tempest 
of his joy ! The manner appears to be hideous, 
the deliverance to be negative and legal only ; but 
his heart is ranging high enough, in its better 



AND REMOVED. 209 

element — the righteousness of God — not to be of- 
fended by the crudities he is taking for a gospel. 

But this is not the first time that the head of a great 
man has not been equal to the understanding, or 
true interpretation, of his hear^;. Indeed, nothing is 
more common, as a matter of fact, than for men of 
real or even the highest intelligence, to so far misin- 
terpret their own experience in matters of religion, as 
to ascribe to it, and find it springing radically out of, 
that which has no sound verity, and could never have 
produced such an experience. Let no one be sur- 
prised, then, that Luther's justification by faith, that 
which puts his soul ringing with such an exultant and 
really sublime liberty, makes a plunge so bewildering 
into bathos and general unreason, when it comes to 
be affirmed theologically in his doctrine. As he had 
it in his Christian consciousness, the soul of his joy, 
the rest of his confidence, the enlargement of his 
gracious liberty, nothing could be more evidently real 
and related to the deepest realities of feeling ; but as 
he gave it in his dogmatic record, I confess that call- 
ing it justification by faith — articulus stantis, vel 
cadentis ecclesice — I could more easily see the church 
fall than believe it. Happily our very great reverence 
and admiration for the man may be accommodated in 
the confidence that any one may reject it utterly, and 
yet receive all that his faith received in his justifica- 
tion ; and may also be with him in profoundest sym- 
pathy, in the magnificat he chants, and, with such 

exhaustless eloquence of boasting, reiterates, in his 

18* 



210 OBJECTIONS STATED 

preaching of the cross and the glorious liberty it 
brings. Certain it is that no man is a proper Chris- 
tian, who is not practically, at least, in the power of 
this great truth. If any thing defines a Christian, it 
is that he is one who seeks and also finds his right- 
eousness in God. 

II. 

I am well aware how insufficient this exposition of 
the great Christian truth, justification by faith, will 
be to many — to some, because it is a truth that can be 
sufficiently expounded by nothing but a living expe- 
rience of its power; to others, because they have 
already learned to find their experience in words and 
forms of doctrine, by which it is poorly, or even 
falsely represented. What questions the view pre- 
sented will encounter, especially from this latter 
class, I very well know, and will therefore bring 
the subject to a conclusion by answering a few of 
them. 

Do we not then, by holding a view of justification 

so essentially subjective, virtually annihilate the dis- 

Justification tinction between justification and sanc- 

and sanctification tification ? This is one of the questions, 

not confounded. an(J j ^^ it hj gaying ^ if the 

two experiences were more closely related than they 
are commonly supposed to be, I do not see that we 
need be greatly disturbed on that account. Still they 
are sufficiently distinct. According to the Catholic 
doctrine they are virtually identical ; because the 
" making just," or " making righteous," which is con- 



AND REMOVED. 211 

ceived to be the sense of justification, is understood to 
be a complete subjective change, one that goes below 
consciousness and makes the soul inherently right — 
which is the very significance also of sanctification. 
But if we only conceive the soul to be so joined, by 
its faith, to the righteousness of God, as to be rather 
invested by it, or enveloped in it, than to be trans- 
formed all through in its own inherent quality ; if the 
righteousness goes on, even as the sun goes on shining 
when it makes the day, and stops of necessity when 
the faith withdrawn permits it to go on no longer ; then 
we have a very wide and palpable distinction. The 
consciousness of the subject, in justification, is raised 
in its order, filled with the confidence of right, set free 
from the bondage of all fears and scruples of legality ; 
but there is a vast realm back of the consciousness, 
or below it, which remains to be changed or sanctified, 
and never will be, except as a new habit is generated 
by time, and the better consciousness descending into 
the secret roots below, gets a healing into them more 
and more perfect. In this manner, one who is justi- 
fied at once, can be sanctified only in time; and one 
who is completely justified is only incipiently sancti- 
fied ; and one who has consciously " yielded his mem- 
bers as instruments of righteousness unto God," may 
discover even more and more distinctly, and, by mani- 
fold tokens, a law in his members not yet sanctified 
away. There is also a certain reference in justifica- 
tion to one's standing in everlasting principle ; whereas 
sanctification refers more especially to the conscious 



212 OBJECTIONS STATED 

purity of the soul's aims, and the separation of its 
moral habit from evil. By another distinction, justi- 
fication is the purgation of the conscience, and sancti- 
fication a cleansing of the soul's affections and pas- 
sions. Both of course are operated by God's inspira- 
tions, and are operated only in and through the faith 
of the subject. 

There is indeed no objection to saying that, in a 
certain general way, they are one — just as faith is one 
with love, and love with regeneration, and this with 
genuine repentance, and all good states with all 
others. The same divine life or quickening in God is 
supposed in every sort of holy exercise, and the differ- 
ent names we give it represent real and important 
differences of meaning, accordingly as we consider the 
new life quickened in relation to our own agency, or 
to God's, or to means accepted, or trusts reposed, or 
effects wrought. In the same way, justification is 
sanctification, and both are faith ; and yet their differ- 
ence is by no means annihilated. 

Another question likely to be raised in the way of 

objection is, whether, in the kind of justification 

How related to stated, I do not give in to the rather 

amputation? antiquated notion of imputed righteous- 
ness ? To this I answer, that if the notion supposed 
to be thus antiquated, is the theologic fiction of a sur- 
plus obedience, over and above what was due from 
Christ as a man — contributed by him in pains and 
acts of duty from the obedience of his higher nature 
— which surplus is imputed to us and reckoned to our 



AND REMOVED. 213 

account, such imputation is plainly enough rejected ; 
still there will be left the grand, experimental, Scrip- 
ture truth of imputed righteousness, a truth never 
more to be antiquated than holiness itself. 

The theologic fiction more fully stated appears to 
have been something like this : that Christ, taken sim- 
ply as a man, was under all the obligations that be- 
long to a man ; therefore that he was only righteous 
as he should be in fulfilling those obligations, and had 
no righteousness to spare ; but that, as being the God- 
man, he was under no such obligations ; whence it re- 
sulted that, by his twofold obedience, passive and 
active, he gained two kinds of surplus righteousness ; 
a passive to stand in the place of our punishment and 
be a complete satisfaction for it, and an active to be 
set to our account as being our positive obedience — 
both received by imputation. And so we are justified 
and saved by a double imputed righteousness, one to 
be our suffered penalty, the other to be such an 
obedience for us as will put us even with the precept 
of the law. It is even a sad office to recite the 
scholastic jingle of such a scheme, made up and re- 
ceived for a gospel. Plainly it is all a fiction. The 
distinction of a passive and active obedience is a fic- 
tion ; the passive obedience being just as voluntary as 
the active, and therefore just as active. The assump- 
tion that Christ, to put righteousness upon us, must 
provide a spare righteousness not wanted for himself, 
is a fiction that excludes even the possible hrinonia of 
the righteousness of God. And a still greater fiction 



214 OBJECTIONS STATED 

is tlie totally impossible conception of a surplus right- 
eousness. Christ was just as righteous as he should 
be, neither more nor less, and the beauty of his sacri- 
fice lay in the fact, not that it overlapped the eternal 
law, but that it so exactly fulfilled that law. His 
merit therefore was not that he was better than he 
should be, but all that he should be ; for if he was 
perfect without the surplus, then he was more than 
perfect with it, and we are left holding the opinion, 
that there is a righteousness above and outside of per- 
fection ! Still again the imputation of such a perfec- 
tion to us, so that we shall have the credit of it, is a 
fiction also of the coldest, most unfructifying kind, 
and impossible even at that. What has any such pile 
of merit in Christ, be it suffering, or sacrifice, or pun- 
ishment, or active righteousness, to do with my per- 
sonal deserts ? If a thousand worlds-full of the sur- 
plus had been provided for me, I should be none the 
less ill deserving if I had the total reckoning in pos- 
session. 

The experimental, -never-to-be antiquated, Scripture 
truth of imputed righteousness, on the other hand, is 
this : — That the soul, when it is gained to faith, is 
brought back, according to the degree of faith, into its 
original, normal relation to God ; to be invested in 
God's light, feeling, character — in one word, righteous- 
ness — and live derivatively from Him. It is not made 
righteous, in the sense of being set in a state of self- 
centered righteousness, to be maintained by an ability 
complete in the person, but it is made righteous in the 



AND REMOVED. 215 

sense of being always to be made righteous ; just as 
the clay is made luminous, not by the light of sunrise 
staying in it, or held fast by it, but by the ceaseless 
outflow of the solar effulgence. Considered in this 
view, the sinning man justified is never thought of as 
being, or to be, just in himself; but he is to be counted 
so, be so by imputation, because his faith holds him to 
a relation to God, where the sun of His righteousness 
will be forever gilding him with its fresh radiations. 
Thus Abraham believed God enough to become the 
friend of God— saying nothing of justice satisfied, 
nothing of surplus merit, nothing of Christ whatever 
— and it was imputed to him for righteousness. No 
soul comes into such a relation of trust, without hav- 
ing God's investment upon it; and whatever there 
may be in God's righteousness — love, truth, sacrifice 
— will be rightfully imputed, or counted to be in it, 
because, being united to Him, it will have them 
coming over derivatively from Him. Precisely here 
therefore, in this most sublimely practical of all truths, 
imputed righteousness, Christianity culminates. Here 
we have coming upon us, or upon our faith, all that 
we most want, whether for our confidence, or the com- 
plete deliverance and upraising of our guilty and 
dreadfully enthralled nature. Here we triumph. 
There is therefore now no condemnation, the law of 
the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free. 
If we had a righteousness of the law to work out, we 
should feel a dreadful captivity upon us. If we were 
put into the key of righteous living, and then, being 



216 OBJECTIONS STATED 

so started, were left to keep the key ourselves, by 
manipulating our own thoughts, affections, actions, in 
a way of self-superintendence, the practice would be 
so artificial, so inherently weak, as to pitch us into 
utter despair in a single day. Nothing meets our 
want, but to have our life and righteousness in God, 
thus to be kept in liberty and victory always by our 
trust in Him. Calling this imputed righteousness, it 
is no conceit of theology, no fiction, but the grandest 
and most life-giving of all the Christian* truths. 

We have this imputation also in another form that 
is equally natural and practical. Thus, instead of 

w . having our faith imputed unto us for 

have our right- righteousness, we ourselves teach our 
P uta " faith to locate all our righteousness pu- 
tatively in God ; saying " The Lord our 
righteousness," " Christ who is our life," " made unto 
us righteousness ;" as if the stock of our virtue, or 
holiness, were laid up for us in God. All the hope of 
our character that is to be, we place, not in the inher- 
ent good we are to work out, or become in ourselves, 
but in the capital stock that is funded for us in Him. 
And then the character, the righteousness, is the more 
dear to us, because it is to have so high a spring ; and 
God is the more dear to us, that he will have us hang 
upon him by our faith, for a matter so divine. And 
the joy also, the confidence, the assurance and rest — 
all that we include in our justification — is the more 
sublimely dear, that we have it on a footing of per- 
mitted unity with God, so transforming and glorious. 



eousness 
tively in God. 



AND REMOVED. 217 

There is, in short, no truth that is richer, and fuller of 
meaning and power, than this same figure of mental 
imputation, in which we behold our character laid up 
and funded for us in the righteousness of God. In 
one view it is not true ; there is no such quantity, or 
substance, separate from him, and laid up in store for 
us ; but there is a power in him everlastingly able to 
beget in us, or keep flowing over upon us, every gift 
our sin most needs; and this we represent to our 
hearts, by conceiving, in a* figure, that we have a stock, 
just what we call " our righteousness," laid up for us, 
beforehand, in the richly funded stores of his eternity. 
It is no fault then of our doctrine of justification by 
faith, that it favors a notion of imputed righteousness ; 
for in just this fact it is, that the gospel takes us out of 
the bondage of works into a really new divine liberty. 
Here, in fact, is the grand triumph of Christianity ; 
viz., in the new stage of righteousness inaugurated, 
which makes the footing of a sinner good, and helps 
the striving bondman of duty to be free; even the 
righteousness of God that is by faith of Jesus 
Christ, unto all, and npon all them that believe. 
When this is antiquated, just then also will salva- 
tion be. 

19 



CHAPTER IV. 

THREEFOLD DOCTRINE OF CHRIST CONCERNING HIMSELF. 

It must have occurred to a great many disciples, 
working in the interest of doctrine, to imagine how 
great a thing it would have been, had Christ himself, 
in his own superior, unquestionable competence, seen 

A great omis- n * ^° frame a statement for his followers 
sion of Christ re- of what he himself conceived his gospel, 
gretted. Qr t]ie doctrine Q f j^g g0S pel, to be. It 

may even have been a subject of wonder, sometimes, 
that he did not do it. All the greater wonder, that 
he could have done it so easily, and saved, or at least 
greatly reduced, the necessity of misunderstandings 
and controversies often painful. And yet, if I rightly 
conceive his meaning, he has, in fact, done it; pre- 
senting us a complete and explicit summation of the 
results he will have accomplished by his life and death. 
For this appears to be the significance of what he puts 
forth in his promise of the Comforter.* His very de- 
sign is, if I am right, to show us in this passage, the 
doctrinal outfit he will have provided for the Spirit, 
coming now to take his place. It is expedient, he 

* John xvi. 7-15. 

(218) 



THE OFFICE AND ARMAMENT, ETC. 219 

says, for him now, since he has done, as in terms of 
body and' space, all which can be done under snch 
limitations, to withdraw from visibility, or go away. 
In this kind of ministry having come to his limit, only 
by another can his work be fulfilled. A traveling grace 
can not, by supposition, be ecumenical. He puts off 
What is wanting now is a distributive now locality and 
power that can be present every where, orm ' 
and occupy all places, without travel or transition ; a 
Spirit universal that has the liberty of the world. 
The new ministration of the Comforter, now prom- 
ised, is to be exactly this ; a Christ delocalized, in- 
visible, under no laws of space, and practically 
universal. 

Three things, in particular, are to be the outfit of 
his working in all the ages to come ; which three 
things he now calls " the things that are mine ;" be- 
cause he has prepared them by his life and death, and 
gotten them ready, as in word and form, to be the in- 
strumental forces of truth and spirit invisible or 
out of form — " He shall glorify me, he shall receive 
of mine, and shall show it unto you." They compose 
a creed, as he gives it, in three articles ; His three 
for though he does not give them to be articles. 

a creed in our sense of the term, he does give them to 
be a brief summation of what he has done, set forth 
in their potential value, or practical significance. He 
will go forth now, no more as in body, but as all- 
diffusive, every where present Spirit, reproving the 
world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment — 



220 THE OFFICE AND 

" Of sin," he says, " because," being what I have been 
and doing what I have done, " they believe not on me." 
" Of righteousness because I go to the Father " — 
borne up in ascension to worlds above the world — 
" and ye see me no more." " Of judgment because 
the prince of this world is judged" — cast down, 
crushed and visibly brought under. In Christ's own 
opinion, as we see, these three things are the sub- 
stance of what he has done for the world, the equip- 
ment he has made ready for the Spirit, and put 
in hand to be the operative force of his regen- 
erative ministry for the world. In the use of this 
divine armament he becomes, what is here given to 
be his designation, the Spirit of truth ; for the 
threefold substance of doctrine here set forth is to be 
his implemental power. 

There really appears to be no word of scripture 
which has fared as badly, at the hands of preachers 
The word Com- and commentators, as this word Com- 
forter a mistake. f 0T t er ^ f which I now speak. I say 
this considering the difficulty of finding any word in 
English that will fitly represent the Greek word 
Paraclete. It is once translated Advocate." The 
commentators suggest other words such as Helper, 
Counsel, Teacher, Intercessor. The very poorest, thin- 
nest representation ever proposed, or adopted, is our 
English name Comforter. And it is all the worse 
that it is evidently intended to be taken as being 
naturally descriptive ; for another word is even 
* 1 John ii, 1. 



ARMAMENT OF THE SPIRIT. 221 

palpably mistranslated to conform to it — " I will not 
leave you comfortless "* — where the word " comfort- 
less " represents the word orphans in the original, the 
Saviour's design being in that word to say that he 
will not leave his disciples deserted, robbed of 
company and counsel ; a very different matter from 
being left un comforted. As if their being uncomforta- 
ble, or not sufficiently comforted, were a principal, 
or prominent concern of the Master ; a friend whose 
dignity it was to hold the rational and manly view of 
all experience, and have it as a matter conceded, that 
the best thing for them will sometimes be to fall out 
of condition, and be as grandly superior to all self- 
sympathy in the loss of earthly comforts, as he has 
been himself. ISTo, there is no such feeble, over-soft 
sympathy in the Saviour's mind, in this parting hour, 
that he should be contriving how especially to put 
his disciples in comfort and leave them so. Besides, 
his concern here is not for his disciples, but specially 
for such as he calls " the world ;" for it is the world 
he is going to convince and bring to righteousness. 
And if the Spirit to be given is to be a gift having 
special reference to this, which appears in the man- 
ner of the language, the name Comforter is a name 
wholly inappropriate. To be comforted is just the 
thing the world as such does not want. And the 
Saviour has a much heavier and nobler concern ; 
viz., the organizing of a grace for the world, such 
as he is just now bringing to completion. He is 

* John xiv, 18. 
19* 



222 THE OFFICE AND 

planning to unlocalize, universalize, and make vic- 
torious, the great salvation he has undertaken for 
mankind. And his idea stands on the face of the 
word he adopts for the designation of this promised 
ministry, whether we can find an English name for it 
or not. It is Paraclete — Para near, kletos call — the 
Near-caller, the Bring er-in, for salvation ; a word in 
no soft, soothing key, but a bugle note of sum- 
mons rather, such as the work of the Spirit, in the 
in-gathering and organizing of the everlasting king- 
dom, fitly requires. 

As we strike this conception we begin to see how 
grand a thought is in the Saviour's mind when he 
names his three things. They are as far off, all, from 
the insipid offices of comfort as they can be, and are 
rightly named as reproving powers — " reproving of 
sin, of righteousness, of judgment — just such offices of 
truth, and piercing conviction, as the great Bringer-in 
of the world must needs fulfill. 

At the same time I quite willingly concede that 

there is a certain superficial aspect of fairness, in the 

He dispenses representations that interpret the prom- 

comfort, of ised Spirit by the words Comforter and 

course. Comfort ; for it may be imagined, from 

the words " Whom the world can not receive,"* that 
the promise is to have its value in the experience only 
of disciples. But when construed in that way, the 
express terms of the threefold promise, in the six- 
teenth chapter, are even all of them denied any 

* John xiv, 17. 



ARMAMENT OF THE SPIRIT. 223 

chance of meaning at all. Besides the grand effect 
is formally declared to be, in a "reproving of the 
world" — raising sentiments of conviction, sensibilities 
of character, impressions of judgment, in the world. 
And we are not required to run our interpretation 
directly against this passage by insisting that the 
other — " Whom the world can not receive " — must be 
taken in the largest meaning possible ; for it probably 
means only that the world as world, unmoved, nnre- 
proved, dwelling wholly apart from God in the blind- 
ness of nature, can not thus receive or entertain the 
Spirit. Nothing is more affectingly true. Holding 
this view of the scripture in question, I am not re- 
quired to say that the Holy Spirit of promise is to 
have no office of comfort included in his work. He 
is to fulfill every good office in his ministry, even as 
Christ himself did. But it will be as far as possible 
from any right statement of his mission, that he is to 
be, in chief and in a degree most of all significant, a 
dispenser of comfort. Christ's own last words in the 
inspiring strain of comfort and courage and patience 
under persecutions to come, are full of beauty and of 
tender cheer, but it is not proposed that the Holy 
Spirit should always or ever make that kind of com-, 
fort any principal object of his work. He will com- 
fort where he may ; convince, correct, fortify in pa- 
tience, chasten, bring low, confound by rebuke, where 
he must. 

Taking now this general view of the Spirit in 
Christ's three points above stated, there ought to be 



224 THE REPROVING OF SIN 

some light for ns in them, if we go over them care- 
fully and make up our conception from them, as we 
easily may, of the gospel doctrine designedly sum- 
marized in them. We shall get in this manner, a 
fresh coining of the gospel idea, clear of all the con- 
structive wisdoms and unwisdoms heretofore pro- 
pounded as the inevitable theologic truth. For this 
three-membered gospel, set off and labeled numer- 
ically for the outfit of the Spirit, appears to have 
scarcely taken the attention hitherto of the formula- 
ries and school functionaries. "Wherefore it is left 
us, or appears to be, for our privilege, to draw first 
lessons here of atonement from the lips of Christ 
himself. 

It may not be amiss to suggest, as a reason -for this 
oversight, that the preachers and commentators ap- 
- Christ not to P ear to have been too much occupied 
be overlooked with the stress Christ lays on the work 
of the Spirit, to observe, at all, the 
rather silent implication of his reference to the part 
he himself is to have in the work. It is not simply 
promised, we are to observe, that the Spirit will do 
these things, but that he will do them in and by the 
energizing powers of impression now made ready for 
his use. In the first it is as if it were said, " They 
shall look on me whom they have pierced." The con- 
viction wrought by the Spirit is to come of what 
Christ has been to men, who yet do not believe in 
him. So of the " righteousness ;" it shall be what 
Christ himself has' revealed by his life and death and 



BY UNBELIEF IN CHRIST. 225 

ascension to the Father. And the same is true as we 
shall see of the world reproved " of judgment." The 
Spirit will be the agent, Christ the power. "We do 
but half conceive the Saviour when we refer all these 
three-fold results to the Spirit ; for He works them, 
if at all, by a dispensing of Christ from the magazine 
stock he has furnished. In this view we now return 
to the threefold matter of the promise. 

Article I. Of sin because they believe not on me. In 
recovering our fallen race to God, the first thing is to 
beget in them a fixed conviction of their fall, and 
the thraldom of their guilt, as creatures alienated 
from God. And this Christ thinks he is doing ; for it 
is "the world" observe that he will thus reprove. 
His thought is, we can see, that from this time forth, 
as the result of his incarnate life and death, there is 
to be a new sensibility to sin, not only in individual 
persons, but in the world itself, such as never before 
was observed. I feel quite sure too that a sufficiently 
sharp investigation would show it to be so ; that re- 
ligious sentiments and convictions run deeper and 
carry more heat through mind, since Christ's day than 
before, in all the peoples that are in the • New se nsibil- 
knowledge of his cross. I recollect no ity to sin under 
instance of remorse, for example, in the nst * 
literature and story of the Greeks, that holds any cor- 
respondence or comparison with examples that are 
even common in the Christian nations. And what is 
closely related, the sense of sin is sharper and more 



226 THE REPROVING OF SIN 

heavily pronounced in the Christian peoples and liter- 
atures than elswhere. Indeed, I might almost ven- 
ture to say that there is no proper sense of sin outside 
of the gospel religion. There is sensibility enough to 
Sins, not sin, wrongs suffered, and a considerable 
commonly felt. sense of wrongs ^one. But these are 

sins only, not sin. The state of sin as a condition of 
life underlaid with guilt, infested with poisons, and 
become a second nature in the run of its bad causa- 
tions, is a quite different matter. Only a very few 
of the first minds out of Christianity such as Plato, 
Seneca, and others, are observed to become distinctly 
conscious of sin, whereas in the saving work of the 
Spirit under Christ, no one, however humble or weak, 
is conceived to be in the possible range of a true con- 
version to God, who is not prepared to it by the con- 
viction of sin as a state. No man is converted to a 
new life under the consciousness of a sin, or this, or 
that, or even many sins, unless there is implicitly 
joined with that consciousness, or included in it, the 
sense of a guiltiness that is chronic and by the subject 
himself incurable. Hence the Saviour says "of sin," 
well understanding that it is sin he is required to cure, 
and not sins that he has undertaken to simply correct. 
And, in order to this, some plummet of reproving, 
deep enough to reach the bottom of the sea, needs to 
be let down in guilty bosoms, and make report to 
them of what is commonly hid in the ooze that under- 
lies their consciousness. It is remarkable in this view 
that the appalling chapters of reproof and judgment, 



BY UNBELIEF IN CHRIST. 227 

which occur in the world's history before the cruci- 
fixion scene of Christ's death, almost none of them 
strike deep enough to plough up and set in true con- 
viction the radical fact of sin, as distinguished from 
particular sins. Is there not some reason to doubt 
the possibility of doing more, until the moral con- 
sciousness of the race may be made capable of it by 
ages of discipline ? 

Hence the flood, in whatever degree of universality 
we conceive it, was not so much God's argument with 
sin, as his act of extirpation, washing Defects of the 
the world clean of it. However, it has old method s- 
had a valuable efficacy doubtless ever since, as a wit- 
ness of the divine displeasure against the ways of 
license and revolting wickedness. The fire-blast that 
fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, and the earthquake 
shock that swallowed them, have been used in all 
ages since, as appeals of warning. We ourselves have 
many times heard such appeals, and their fiery terrors 
we have seen chasing guilty souls up out of the plain 
into the mountains of refuge, till we have sometimes 
doubted whether more of hurry and panic than of 
true conviction, is not sometimes instigated by them. 
!No one doubts that alarm may sometimes be stronger 
than consideration, and that when it is, more of 
damage will follow than of benefit. In the giving of 
the law at the foot of the thundering, smoking mount, 
an impression of God's authority was made by 
the sceneries of the occasion, that must of course in- 
tensify the dread of sin, though it may not have had 



228 THE REPROVING OF SIN 

any great effect in awakening the consciousness of it. 
And there was the less reason to expect any such re- 
sult, in the fact that the statutes of the law refer only 
to sins of particular action, and not to the state of sin 
itself as a matter of much deeper concern. The same 
thing is to be said commonly of the stinging reproofs, 
and fiery rebukes, hurled at the sins of the time by 
the old preachers of Israel, in what was called their 
prophesying. They shot point blank every time, and 
kept the air ringing with specific and particular 
charges, which gave them a sufficiently pungent min- 
istry, but they could not move the deeps of character 
and conviction, as they would have done had they 
been able to speak more reflectively, threading the 
sensibilities back of the sins, and blazing their torches 
in the caverns of the soul where sin itself is hid. 
About the most impressive exhibition of sensibility to 
sin, which occurs any where in the times previous to 
Christ's coming, is shown us in the scene that follows 
the discovery of the book of the law.* Partly be- 
cause of the tenderness produced by a mental retro- 
version, that imagines how the wrath of the Lord 
must be kindled by the neglects of the fathers, " not 
hearkening to the words of the book," but allowing 
it to be lost among the lumber of the temple 
chamber. It is felt now as the public sin, a kind of 
original sin, that has been running down through long 
ages and generations gone by. . The whole people 
were deluged thus with guiltiness coming down upon 

* 2 Kings xxii, 8. et seq. 



BY UNBELIEF IN CHRIST. 229 

them in the line of their family blood and affections, 
and the king rent his clothes in their midst, and wept 
before the Lord. 

I sketch this outline simply to show how difficult a 
thing it is to raise a true sensibility to sin, such as 
that which made itself evident in the How Christ 
time of the Pentecost shortly after himself re i jrovcs - 
Clnist's ascension. And this scene of the Pentecost 
was a kind of first-stage proof of Christ's meaning 
when lie said, " Of sin because they believe not on 
me." His understanding was, in these words, that he 
was going by his death to move on the hardness and 
blindness of transgression, by a comparatively new 
method, giving us, in that fact, the first article of his 
gospel. He is not going to shake the security of sin 
by terrors of any kind. He will paint no sceneries of 
wrath on the sky. He will not arraign, or reprove, 
or denounce more pungently than was ever done be- 
fore. He will have simply proved himself to be the 
friend of man, by the sublimest and most disinter- 
ested charities and a character so great all round 
as to be more than mortal, and beside this will 
have done nothing to so much as remind men of their 
sin. Only being such in the worth and more than 
human beauty of his life, he will simply let the 
wrong that is in guilty bosoms break itself upon his 
silence, and prove what is in it by its act of murder ! 
And not even the murder is to implicate more than a 
very few persons. Only the race, looking on, will 

confess, " these were men, our fellow men," as all the 

20 



230 THE REPROVING OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

people did who came together to that sight, and be- 
holding the things which were done, without being- 
active in them, smote their breasts and returned. 
Here, now, is another way of reproving that cuts 
the world clean through. Every man sees what is 
in man — in himself — by the impatience that could 
be mortally exasperated by goodness, and rush 
upon the Son of God himself in a deed of murder. 
And the conviction thus wrought is no dry hammer- 
stroke under the law, of which we sometimes hear, 
but it has a quality more personal than legal, running 
fluid in the form as all personal feeling will ; a new- 
born, silent, all-pervading sensibility to sin, such as 
Christ himself expected. Furthermore, it is not 
stated in a way to magnify the flagrance of bad 
action as a positive ill-doing, but the sin is to be re- 
vealed to itself in what it does not, rather than in 
what it does. " Of sin because they believe not on me ;" 
for the not believing is itself a token how significant, 
when a grace so beautiful and grandly impressive is 
revealed. And what, in fact, is the proof most ap- 
palling of the sin-state of the world, but that it can 
look on so great glory and still not believe ? 

Neither is it any answer, at this point, that not be- 
lieving is no crime, because we are under no obliga- 
Guiit revealed tions to believe. For man is made to 

by unbelief. ^ e a "believing creature as truly as a 
reasoning creature. He is even to apprehend the 
highest reaches of truth and being, by believing what 
belongs to faith, and can no otherwise be received. 



231 

So that when he lives in a way to never behold the 
greatest and most captivating realities crowded on his 
faith, he lives below himself, " alienated from the 
life of God by the ignorance that is in him because 
of the blindness of his heart." Indeed, the sin of sin 
is more than any thing else, in the not believing of 
what is best revealed, most credible, and holiest to be 
received. Even as the great assembly of the Pente- 
cost began to feel when the guilt of their unbelief, 
displayed in the scene of the cross, began to be judg- 
ment revealed by the preaching of Peter. And so 
that word — " Of sin because they believe not on me," 
has been fulfilled in its power from that day to this. 

Article II. Of righteousness because I go to the Father 
and ye see me no more" The statement here made is 
condensed to the last degree, but I think we can not 
miss the idea. Christ is not any the more truly right- 
eous, as we all can see, that he dies and goes home 
to the Father, to be seen no more. But, being as 
truly righteous, we can, beyond a question, far better 
appreciate his righteousness after he is gone, than we 
could if he still remained with us. 

All great excellence and transcendent worth of 
character are partly unappreciated, till they are seen to 
be consummated in the article of death. Eemoval con- 
Many hard accusations doubtless fell on summates great 
Enoch, before the day "when he was <* aracter - 
not, because God took him." Moses was how often 
chided and rebelled against, and never measured in 



232 THE EEPROVING OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

the greatness of his worth, till God called him up 
into ISTebo to die, and buried him there himself, in a 
place that only he shall ever know. Socrates was 
charged with many crimes, and especially with cor- 
rupting the youth, and refusing due honors to the 
gods of his people. But when he took the fatal cup, 
refusing, as a matter of supreme duty to the state, to 
accept the chance of flight provided by his friends, 
what was there left for his people, but to turn his 
sentence back on the life of his chief accuser, drive 
his conspirators into exile, and raise a statue to him as 
the righteous man, out of their own hearts' devotion. 
Aristides had been called the Just, that is the right- 
eous, till some of the people had become quite tired 
of it. Finally, after having proved his capacity many 
times over as one of the greatest commanders of his 
country, and his title as the Just a great many tunes 
more, by acts and arbitration judgments bearing the 
stamp of his wonderful uprightness, he became ex- 
tremely old, growing all the while more cheap in 
his virtue as he grew more customary in it, and finally 
fell out of life and his many public offices and trusts, 
as a man almost forgotten by his people. But when 
they heard of his sublime poverty — that he could 
only be buried at the public expense— they woke up, 
as it were, at the discovery of so great public honor 
and fidelity, and found no way possible to pay their 
debt but by lavishing thus late on his family, rewards 
that were due them only as bearing his name. 

ISTow these humble, merely human examples fall a 



233 

great way short, I know, of the case for which they 
are cited, but they let us in very deep nevertheless 
into the secret of the Saviour's meaning when he 
says — " Of righteousness because I go to the Father 
and ye see me no more." He understands that when 
he is gone, ascended to the Father in a Christ counts on 
way so impressive, a great revision will a great revislon - 
commence, and a great discovery will be made. He 
had come clown out of the righteousness of God in his 
advent, he had given it for beatitude to his followers 
to be " hungering and thirsting after righteousness " 
— " seeking first the righteousness of God " — he 
had been himself a remarkable man in his life, suf- 
ficiently remarkable to be considered a prophet ; yet 
one thing more he still perceives is wanting before 
his followers will begin to imagine the deific property 
in his character; he must go back into God as he 
came forth out of God, and when his death and reas- 
cension have taken him quite away, great revisions 
of thought will come, and the true deific right- 
eousness will begin to beam out upon them, and the 
unmatched glory of his nature will be fully discov- 
ered. Discovery most transcendently blessed and 
powerful, how shall they name it but to say — The 
Lord Our Righteousness ! 

There has never entered into human thought before, 
any so pure image of good, any so glorious conception 
of the righteous in character. Men had framed high 
thoughts before of the abstract righteousness of God. 

Now they have it dewed with personality, exampled 

20* 



234 THE REPROVING OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 

and offered in terms of human life and sympathy. 
God is not greater of course in his righteousness 
than before, but the manly voice and bearing, and the 
well doing and well suffering, have made him closer, 
more congenially, powerfully great. And Christ does 
not conceal it from us that, in this matter of the 
righteousness to be discovered in his departure, he 
expects to have a warmth and glory added that will 
make his life a seminally quickening force in unbe- 
lieving minds — a reproving that will be the living 
impression of righteousness. And his expectation 
is abundantly justified. It has not only operated 
as a new creative force in multitudes without num- 
ber of guilty, morally fallen men, but it has leav- 
ened the general mass of Christendom with a sensi- 
bility to character before unknown. Men hear a 
The new be- Christly accent in principles, perhaps 
gotten sense of without knowing it, and love, and 
character. truth, and equity, in one word right- 

eousness, holds a closer and more tender proximity 
than ever before. And the explanation of it is in 
what the Saviour says — " He shall reprove the world 
of righteousness, because I go to the Father and ye see 



I will only add that there is a very great import- 
ance in this Second Article, in the fact that it yields 
No legal justi- an inference so conclusive against the 
fication here, paymaster scheme of justification. 
And it is the more conclusive that nothing is ad- 



by Christ's ascension. 235 

vanced antagonistically, but only in a simple way 
of promise and hope for righteousness. There is no 
legal substitution named or even thought of by 
Christ, as that having satisfied the law by suffering, 
he has bought a complete legal righteousness and so 
has laid a ground of justification. His reproving of 
righteousness is to be a quickened sensibility for right- 
eousness itself, and a new capacity of great character 
thus prepared — that and nothing more. And if he 
had been asked whether he expected to buy a new 
righteousness for us by his cross, and have it put to 
our account, so that we can be justified and delivered 
of our sins, I really do not think he would have 
understood or conceived so much of theology. No, 
by his reproving of righteousness he simply means 
that he will put us in the power and occupancy of it ; 
which he will do by the revealed image given us of it 
in his life and suffering ; without thrusting us into 
any of the speculative and scholastic subtleties that 
have since been the annoyance of his people. Hav- 
ing first, by the loving sacrifice of his death, reproved 
the unbelieving of their sin, he next finds how to 
impress their sin with the manifested glory of right- 
eousness — giving them a new sensibility for both, 
one as malady and the other as cure — knowing well 
that when our thought gathers to his reascended 
person, considering again what the true glory hid in 
his descended person was, it will be as if the spaces 
between us and God were bridged, and his righteous- 
ness were now with us and upon us. For it is in 



236 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

fact the righteousness of God declared or shown, that 
we may be made righteous in it, as Paul himself ex- 
plicitly teaches. In the simplest possible form of con- 
ceiving it, " Christ is made unto us righteousness." 
Or the same thing is said in other words equally 
plain — " That we might be the righteousness of God 
in him." And it is beautiful to see how Luther, in 
his comment on this reproving of righteousness, drops 
out his litigiousness and his scholastic legalities of 
justification, to speak of the overspreading, inwardly 
transforming righteousness, as if that in fact were all. 
Thus, chanting as it were his hymn, he says — "Now 
he did not go thus to the Father for his own sake ; 
but, as he came for our sakes from heaven, and be- 
came our flesh and blood, so for our sakes he went 
up again, after he had completed the victory over sin, 
death, and hell, and entered into that government, 
whereby he delivers us from all these, and rules in 
such manner that his kingdom is called, and is, right- 
eousness ; that is, sin and evil must pass away therein 
from before God, and men become righteous before God 
and well pleasing to Him" 

Article III. Of judgment because the 'prince of this 
icorld is judged. The judgment of which Christ here 
speaks is to be understood, of. course, as being effected 
by himself in the joint agency of the Paraclete, just 
as, in the other two case% the reproving of sin and of 
righteousness are declared to be. And by adding this 
last article, his syllabus of doctrine or magazine stock 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSERS. 237 

of spiritual armory is made up. For when the trans- 
gressor is reproved of sin because of his unbelief, and 
has the righteousness of God revealed to be upon 
him when believingly accepted, evi- The judgment of 
dently one thing more and only one is tllls world> 
needed to cut off delay and determine promptly his 
decisive choice of salvation ; viz., that some stunning 
blow of judgment be laid on the idols of his world- 
worship — the fashions, follies, splendors of condition, 
expectations of wealth and power, that fasten him by 
their detentive grasp. When these gods of the earth 
are laid low and stripped, of their fascinations, then 
the Spirit will have every thing at his advantage, 
and his triumph will be easy and sure. 

Christ means exactly this when he says, " The 
prince of this world is judged." He is recognizing, 
I conceive, the fact that evil, though in its very nature 
a disorganize]*, is yet a fearfully despotic organizer 
also; using all the over-captivating shows and fasci- 
nations of our temporal state, to build a kingdom in 
the bad and of the bad; rallying, as by a natu- 
rally malign power, all haters of truth and right- 
eousness in a kind of profane concert; applauding 
and setting in honor modes of false opinion, that 
have no show of interlock save in their common op- 
position to God; making standards of fashions that 
approve and sanction corrupt usages and manners 
and shows and pleasures, setting them in such em- 
inence of splendor that society itself " is taken, 
and the captives rush in every where to seize 



/ 



238 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

the prize tliat captivates — able never to resist 
a fashion ; gathering in also the state-craft pow- 
ers, as perhaps the Saviour intimates, when he 
speaks of " the prince of this world," and giv- 
ing over into their hand the money-force and the 
military, and even the religious, to build bul- 
warks of wicked statesmanship, that may be held 
as fortifications against liberty and right for whole 
ages of time. Hence what he is here saying of " the 
world " and " the prince of this world " as the bad 
kingdom, he is concerned to judge and cast down. 
His mind had, in fact, been running in this vein 
during all the years of his previous ministry. As we 
see at a very early time, when he sent out the seventy 
to preach and do mighty works, and when some of 
them reported on return, saying, " Even the devils are 
subject unto us through thy name ;" and he there- 
upon broke out in a sharply ecstatic exclamation, as he 
was almost never known to do before in his very sober 
style of ministration — " I beheld Satan as lightning 
fall from heaven." He does not speak indicatively 
thus, as if he saw the actual precipitation, but pro- 
phetically, or proleptically, even as he does here when 
he says — " Now is the judgment of this world, now is 
the prince of this world cast out." And he means by 
the casting out also what he says again shortly after — 
" The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing 
in me." And this again is just what he intends by the 
being judged, for it is the manner of judgment to 
cast out, or separate, as being in no terms of character 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSEES. 239 

that permit communication. "Depart" is the sen- 
tence, and " hath nothing in me " is the same. Xot 
that Christ proposes here to separate or be separated 
from the world. It is no matter of final judgment that 
concerns him now. He is going rather by the very 
death scene now at hand, to draw all men unto him. 
He only means that there is a kind of judgment-day 
before the judgment, now to be passed, in which he 
will let his divine attitude and action over opposite 
the world be distinctly seen, and the despotic rage 
.and madness of the world be visibly humbled and 
convicted of weakness. The real judgment after 
death is, of course, a different matter. In these 
dreadful hours preceding the cross, we are to see the 
bad empire totter ; in that future judgment we are to 
see it prostrate and forever blasted. 

One very important conclusion will, I think, be im- 
pressed by a revision of the scene; viz., that the 
principal actors and spectators have The actors lose 
their courage taken away, and con- courage, 
sciously feel that they are judged, subsiding into a 
level of dejection that has nothing in common with 
the very great character on whom their enmity is 
wreaked. It follows too as a matter of course that 
the impressions we trace in them, also become ours 
by the immediate sense of our fallen nature 
itself. Indeed it. might even have been worth the 
cost for Christ to go through these horrible scenes 
of abuse and bitter passion, if it had only been to 
show evil in its place, and bring down the pompous 



240 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

inanities of sin to the underling state of weakness 
which is their true significance. 

Plainly enough Judas and Peter are both put under 
judgment, one to die by his own self-avenging 
Judas and instinct, the 'other to be dreadfully 
Peter and the pierced and broken by his Master's 
ig piies s. judgment glance. Annas and Caiaphas 
hate Christ fiercely enough to be strong against him, 
had they not cunning and hypocrisy enough in them 
to be made ingeniously weak instead. They are 
full of expedients, and especially the latter, who 
a few days before, when the council was called on 
the raising of Lazarus, had his plan to put every thing 
right ; and so confident was he in it, that he could 
say — " Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is 
expedient that one man should die for the people, and 
not that the whole nation perish." The true wisdom 
is, do you not see it ? to kill the man, and not have the 
whole nation itself killed by him, or blotted out on his 
account by the Eomans. So they voted, and from that 
day forth had it for their counsel. And now he is in 
hand as their prisoner, the prisoner specially of Caia- 
phas, and we are to see what the man of high expe- 
dients will do with him. Which will be just nothing 
but the raising of a very contemptible scene of bluster, 
designed to intimidate Christ and provoke a storm of 
popular fury against him. In this all the great policies 
and expediencies appear to be quite used up. But the 
night coming on will give time to consider what 
next, and in particular to consider whether a little 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSERS. 241 

caution may not also be expedient ? And then 
behold, in the morning it is concluded that as the 
crime of Jesus has been religious, they had best turn 
the question over to the civil power; for if Christ 
should break out as Messiah in a grand religious 
uprising, that kind of reaction might be dangerous for 
them. On the whole it is very modestly agreed that 
the case must go to Pilate. 

Very early, therefore, in the morning, Caiaphas and 
his attendants are before the door of Pilate's judgment 
hall with the prisoner ; where a very Pilate 

pious scruple takes him, and he can not J ucl S' ed - 
go in lest he be defiled, and so disqualified for the 
passover ! But Pilate very graciously comes out and 
makes a beginning in the porch, asking — "What ac- 
cusation bring ye against this man ?" And Caiaphas 
answers tamely enough, letting cautiously down the 
storm he so tragically raised against yesterday's blas- 
phemy — " If he were not a malefactor we would not 
have brought him unto thee." And then most defer- 
entially Pilate answers — " Take ye him and judge him 
according to your law." Whereupon the. man of 
great expediencies rejoins — "It is not lawful for us 
to put any man to death." And this is the last 
of what he is able to do, save that afterwards, when 
it is quite safe, we find him out among the 
multitude crying, " Crucify him." He has been 
rushing forward in great purpose, and drawing 
backward in great caution, and doubling and 

dodging till the state of nimble confusion is 

21 



242 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

proved to be the utmost result lie can ac- 
complish. 

At this point we leave him and turn ourselves 
to the trial as carried on bj the Roman magistrate 
himself. Pilate is a gentleman ; a procurator of the 
Roman Empire, thoroughly versed in its usages and 
laws, and a man of personal culture generally, though 
very little of a Puritan, as regards the moral signifi- 
cance of his proceedings. Representing in his own 
person the general empire, he becomes almost official- 
ly the Prince of this World. And we shall shortly 
see that, as such, he is being judged himself, and 
utterly broken clown. With all his plausible airs, he 
has yet no sense of justice. He will acquit his pris- 
oner again and again, and will forthwith order him 
scourged to please his enemies, or deliver him over to 
them to be insulted and abused, as they may best like. 
He wants to please every body — to justify the accused 
because he deserves it — to gratify the priests because 
they are a great power in the state — to approve him* 
self to Csesar because he has his office from Csesar — 
to win the applause of the multitude because their 
favor is the necessary condition of successful magis- 
tracy. So that just as all sin is confounded by trying 
to grasp impossible and contrary objects, he falls out 
of counsel, and is pitched about hither and thither, 
as if the idea of justice were lost and could not be 
found. 

He carries on the questioning with a certain air of 
good nature and respectfulness, for the strange man 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSERS. 243 

before him shows a majesty of weight and char- 
acter not to be disregarded. And Christ is the more 
deferential to him for that reason, which makes the 
answers he gives all the more impressive. " Art thou 
the King of the Jews?" With marvelous dignity 
and a nobly balanced moderation he replies — " Sayest 
thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?" 
Is it proposed to try me thus on the loose talk of the 
town, or on what you know concerning me ? How- 
ever, I am a king, avowing it with no offense; for 
my kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom is 
truth, and " every one that is of the truth heareth my 
voice." Pilate is dashed and confounded, for he never 
heard of truth before in this all- world's sense of re- 
ligion, and he rejoins on the instant — What is truth ? 
So deeply impressed is he by the mysterious something 
of the words and the man, that he waits no answer, 
but sallies forth to give his acquittal. 

But the multitude, who are holding court outside, 
are dissatisfied, and vent their impatience in loud 
cries. Whereupon Pilate, who is bound to please the 
people, gives up Jesus to be scourged, and dressed 
in mock symbols of royalty, and finally, since they 
will not cease crying, " crucify him ! crucify him !" he 
gives consent and says, "Take ye him and crucify 
him ; for I find no fault in him." What a for is 
that on which to hang a sentence of death ! Crucify 
him, for there is no justice in it ! But it comes to 
Pilate's ear, by the accusing talk of the Jews, that 
the prisoner had made himself the Son of God. Very 



244 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

un-Roman language certainly, and what if his won- 
derful dignity should be somehow connected with a 
truth so high, in a relationship so divine. "When 
Pilate therefore heard that saying he was the more 
afraid — so much afraid that he begins to think of a 
reconsideration, and at once resumes the questioning. 
Christ at first refuses to answer; for why should he 
consent to answer in a trial that means nothing, and 
can not stand by its own verdict? Pilate does 
not put him nnder guard, and compel him to answer, 
but he uses words more urgent — " Knowest thou not 
that I have power to crucify thee, and power to release 
thee ?" The answer is moderately toned, but is all 
the more impressive, that there is a sense of silent 
thunder in it — " Thou couldest have no power at all 
against me, except it were given thee from above ; 
therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the 
greater sin." All at once Pilate feels as if the atmos- 
phere of the court, were growing sacred, or as 
if he had Apollo or Jupiter before him. And just 
here it was, if I rightly judge, that his wife's note 
came to hand telling him, " Have thou nothing to do 
with that just man, for the gods have set me dream- 
ing ill because of him." What then shall he do ? for 
not even the Roman Empire in him dares proceed. 
He can go no farther, for he has, in fact, no mag- 
istracy left. He can only wash his hands to be 
clear of the innocent blood, and throw it over 
on the poor weak multitude, to take the respons- 
ibility he is himself in no resolution to bear, and 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSERS. 245 

to say, "his blood be upon us and upon our 
children." 

Now it may be that some of us are grown so 
familiar with this story of Pilate, that we shall not 
sufficiently apprehend the judgment- Pilate makes 
day look of it. If it be so, there is yet court t0 Herod - 
one fact that will give us a very truly convincing 
test of it. Pilate, and Herod, the provincial magis- 
trate of Galilee, had hitherto been enemies, on terms 
of personal non-intercourse. But Pilate now takes 
advantage of the presence of Herod in the city, and 
sends over Christ to Herod's quarters, to be exam- 
ined by him. And the result is, we are told, that 
from that day they were made friends together. 
Here then we have a man of dignity, a man who well 
understands what belongs to public character and 
the highest statesmanship, who is put on being recon- 
ciled to his enemy, by what ? Why by what he ap- 
prehends from a poor tradesman, a simple, inoffensive, 
in aggressive person, who is set before him only to be 
his victim — a man without power, showing no re- 
sentments, offering not a sign of resistance. And 
to make sure against him, he undertakes to 
strengthen himself by clubbing hands with his great 
public enemy ! ~No 9 there is more in the case than 
what I have given by this mere external description. 
In this man Christ there is visibly some untried talent 
or resource. Such have not frequently appeared 
either in Jerusalem or at Pome. There is an appall- 
ing- moral force in his bearing, should we not rather 

21* 



246 THE REPROVING OF JUDGMENT 

say, a conspicuously divine force? He somehow 
stirs the superstition of Pilate's nature. For out- 
wardly composed as he is, and as the pride of char- 
acter requires, he is yet anxious inwardly, and even 
disconcerted. He can not guess what great upturn- 
ing, or public revolution, may be coming to pass, by 
the agency of this certainly most remarkable charac- 
ter. Some wondrous future must be wrapped up in 
his person. His look contains a mystery, his words 
are set like oracles. Call it talent, command, author- 
ity of soul, something there is in him that makes 
every thing seem possible. Probably Pilate does not 
run out his thought in just these forms, but he quails 
inwardly in his feeling, in a way that comprehends 
the sense of these indications. Without knowing it, he 
is at a point of concern that really unmans him, and 
by this kind of instigation, which he is not quite 
aware of himself, he is put on conciliating Herod by 
these extraordinary advances. 

Omitting farther reference now to the conduct of 
the particular and more forward parties in the trial, 
the aspect of judgment, we shall see, covers the whole 
transaction. Including every thing done by the 
priests, and the soldiers, and the multitude, it bears a 
The judgment character of low brutality and basely 
looks general, exasperated passion, that we can nowise 
account for, considering the beautiful inofTensiveness 
and silent worth of the victim ; save in the supposi- 
tion of some judicial madness that for the time has 
demonized so many people. And we do this with the 



IN THE CASTING DOWN OF ACCUSERS. 247 

better reason that a correspond en tly disturbed be- 
havior shakes the frame and darkens the face of 
nature itself. The rocks themselves are shuddering 
in the agitation, and the blackened sun can not look 
on the sight ! And what is the feeling coming on us 
all, but exactly that which fell on all the actors and 
beholders concerned, when the hour of sanity and 
right understanding arrived — " And all the people 
that came together to that sight, beholding the things 
that were done, smote their breasts and returned !" 
They had seen the prince of this world judged, and 
had felt the judgment also in themselves. They 
smote their breasts, for the bad kingdom there had re- 
ceived a stunning blow. Calling it the crucifixion-day 
for one party, it is yet more conspicuously a 
scene by which the other is judged and cast down. 
From that day to this the prince of this world has 
had a reduced and broken look. Men of Christian 
countries are visited in evil with a special kind of 
misgiving ; for they have seen, in the dreadful story 
of Christ's trial scene, how weak is the pride and the 
force-principle too of this world, when it is put in 
issue with simple character — how it comes out as a 
culprit judged, even after its rage is spent, and 
after it has had its own way to the fatal end. 

And here at last comes up into view the great fact 
which underlies this whole matter of No j uc i graent 
the reproving of judgment ; viz., that by force, but only 
mere divine force could not compass it, by S' oodness - 
and that nothing but the majesty of moral suffering 



248 THE USES TO BE SERVED 

could. Since God is omnipotent, many are ready, in 
foolish haste, to imagine that he can therefore bring 
in upon evil and the prince of this world, what re- 
proving of judgment he will. Doubtless he can 
make a judgnient-day in force that will trample down 
all sin, and be an everlasting extirpation of it. But 
the probability is that it would trample and extirpate 
all being as well. What is wanted is a casting down 
of evil in beings still existing, still to exist. And 
nothing could do that but some trial scene or cruci- 
fixion-day, that allows it to be seen coping with pure 
excellence or the suffering capacity of goodness with- 
out force. Then it is so visibly defeated by 
victory that it bears a weak and fallen look. The 
victory is plainly on the other side. Hence the awful 
prostration brought on all the active parties in the 
crucifixion-scene when once it was over. And it was 
to be a reproving of judgment in just this way, and 
to continue to be even to the end of the world. 
There was, hi short, no other way of breaking down 
the prince of this world and the pride of evil bodied in 
his kingdom, but to let the eternal patience meet him 
as it well knows how. For this purpose too, in great 
part, Christ was incarnate. For " as the children are 
partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise 
took part of the same ; that through death he might de- 
stroy him that had the power of death, that is the 
devil."* This word death, as I conceive, is to be 
taken in its largest sense; viz., that only death could 
* Heb. ii, 14. 



BY SUCH A DOCTRINE. 249 

slay the killer — that the bad power could be nowise 
broken by force, but that it must needs be done by 
suffering, whereby it is proved to be weak, cast down, 
reproved of judgment. We have still another passage 
of Scripture that has had much difficulty in finding its 
meaning. " For what the law could not do, in that 
it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own 
Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, con- 
demned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the 
law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the 
flesh but after the Spirit."* Here again we have the 
argument turned upon the fact of an incarnation ; and 
the result, viz., a bringing out into spirit and 
righteous liberty, hinges on a condemnation, that is on 
a judgment of sin ; for the word means adverse 
judgment, and is the same that we have been hand- 
ling in these illustrations. Coming for sin, Christ 
must needs condemn sin, or bring down a reproving 
of judgment on it that will loosen its grasp. For 
the grinding it to powder, even as Moses ground 
the golden calf, would not take it away. ~No force 
could accomplish the dislodgment. It must be worsted 
and judged by suffering character. In that lies the 
victory and dear great mystery of the cross. 

Having made our exposition thus of Christ's three- 
fold doctrine as related to the reprov- What we 
ing of sin, of righteousness, and of judg- mean - 
ment, it may be required of us to state more explicitly 

* Romans viii, 3, 4. 



250 THE USES TO BE SERVED 

how much or how little we mean by it, and what are 
to be the nses served by it. 

It was evidently not the Saviour's intention to draw 
out what was afterwards called by theologians a 
syllabus of doctrine. It does not appear that any 
such notion had as yet dawned on the mind of any 
disciple, or teacher. Dogmatic statements, or formu- 
lated propositions of doctrine, were to make their ap- 
pearance farther on, and perhaps to have a certain 
legitimate use, but they very plainly had not yet 
arrived. The Saviour had none but a practical mean- 
ing in his threefold specification ; viz., to so inaugu- 
rate the Spirit, as to give a properly intelligent con- 
ception of his outfit, as* the Bkingee-est for salvation. 
He was to be a kind of invisible preacher present 
with the preachers, taking the things of Christ, and* 
weaving them into the new experience of men. And 
the result was to be that, from and after his death, 
all that he had been doing by his personal min- 
istry was to be a dispensation-force, in this man- 
ner, of life and truth for all the coming ages. 
According to his own conception it will be 
sufficient and complete, and will so be called, 
as afterwards by Paul, " the ministration of the 
Spirit." 

This threefold specification of the Saviour is a doc- 
trine extra, that it will be most agreeable to recur to 
No rival doctrine and hold, because it is given by Christ 
meant. himself. I only conceive that in giving 

it I give another, more intensely practical, doctrine, 



BY SUCH A DOCTRINE. 251 

outlined for us by Christ, which may be used, 
with great advantage, as a complementary mode of 
teaching and statement, and will not work derangement 
or hurtful disorder if it should sometimes be allowed, 
where the mind is late in coming into satisfaction 
by the other forms, to dominate, or determine the 
methods of preaching. It certainly can not be im- 
agined that preaching what Christ himself gave to be 
the outfit of the Holy Spirit, in his saving ministra- 
tion, is not preaching Christ. Besides there is such 
an agreement, or accord, between the more theologic 
forms of doctrine, built up round the terms of law 
and sacrifice, and this which I am here proposing to 
add as another and different, that, partly by reason of 
their difference, they will be always asking for each 
other. It will be as if the former were coming over 
to this to find the regulative mode of preaching, and 
this latter going back to the other to find the basal 
ideas at which the grace begins. And it should not 
be an offense to add, that the very thing most wanted 
now, in this great subject, is the conceded right and 
familiar use of other forms of doctrine differently- 
conceived, and yet in virtual agreement. By long 
ages of use and speculative reiteration we have been 
running down all the scripture figures of propitiation, 
sacrifice, atonement, imputed righteousness, and the 
like, into stunted literalities, till the words them- 
selves have become, in fact, lost words, and can by no 
advertising be recovered. "We shall never get them 
back, till we relax the rigors of literality by letting in 



252 THE USES TO BE SERVED 

other forms, to have an accordant authority and use. 
We shall thus and then begin to recover the living 
ideas we had killed, by the dry timber words, in 
which we put them, and finally to recover the living 
and flexible senses of the words themselves. The 
speculating, over-dogmatizing habit that has been 
pressing us into the literal method, has also, for the 
same reason, been making our gospel narrow and 
close, and a more nearly choking bondage than either 
it could afford to be, or we to make it. And thus 
again, for a double reason, we are to have our account 
in almost any variety of gospel version, that will take 
us clear of the nearly fatal syncope of our literal tethers, 
and give us a more easy play in the figures and poetic 
liberties of the truth. 

Thus Christ, in his first article of doctrine, 
says, "Of sin because they believe not on me," 
expecting evidently that by his cross of sacrifice, 'a 
How the letter new sense of sin will be wakened in the 
palls. newly wakened sensibilities of his re- 

jectors, and in that fact discovers, in great part cer- 
tainly, the value of his sacrifice. Bat we have a 
speculated form of belief which has gotten clear of 
the figurative meaning of sacrifice, maintaining that 
Christ is a literal sacrifice, which, being offered for 
our sin, evens up our account with God, and yields us 
a remission that is in fact complete immunity. 

So in his reproving of righteousness, Christ conceives 
himself to be the righteousness of God charactered in 
outward figure, in his human life,, whereupon the 



BY SUCH A* DOCTRINE. 253 

guilty world coming to him by faith, are to have it 
in them by assimilation, or a certain divine conta- 
gion, having it not from themselves, but only as being 
acted consentingly into it. Thus much in the free, 
figure-painting way ; over against which we have had 
it long made up in quantitative, almost arithmetic 
terms, that Christ has suffered pains enough for us, to 
pay the whole debt of the law, and so far has become 
a righteousness for us ; not a righteousness that makes 
us righteous at all, but that only evens the books. 
To name all the misconceptions by which we have 
robbed the free scripture of its meaning in this man- 
ner, is impossible. We shall never get back the ideas 
lost, till we allow the possibility of double, and treble, 
and quadruple forms. And for one of these, I can 
think of nothing better and more reverent to sug- 
gest, than that which Christ himself has here pro- 
pounded. 

Now it will be imagined, not unlikely by some, 
that there is a want of scope in this threefold version 
of the Saviour," which forbids its being Full scope in the 
used in any sense for a summation of tliree artlcles - 
doctrine. And to this I answer that it is not wanted 
for a summation of doctrine. We have had enough 
of that. What we want a great deal more is some- 
thing to give us greater breadth of standing arid 
greater vitality of idea. And yet some will imagine 
that when Christ announces, first, the reproving of 
sin, and then the reproving of righteousness, he only 

gives us to say, as we have so long been saying, till 

22 



254 THE USES TO BE SERVED 

we have worn out the meaning of the routine 
words themselves — first conviction, then conver- 
sion ; first the law, and then the Spirit ; whereas 
there is scarcely a hair's weight in common between 
this representation and that which Christ is giving. 
The proposed conviction of sin is not here by the 
law, or by any computation of sins and deserved pen- 
alties, but it is to-be by the gospel rather, and to 
come, not as being bolted in by the legal majesty of 
Sinai, but as being melted in by the suffering good- 
ness of Christ. It is to-be a new and tender sensibil- 
ity to sin, raised in the soul, by what Christ has done 
for it, and above all by what it has hitherto refused 
to let him do for it. The chapter he has made for 
it is heavy with sorrow. It is infinite love tracking 
its approach in tears and blood. And the story 
is so deep, and full, and various, and tender, raises 
so many questions, opens so many vistas into the 
divine nature and life, and so many others down the 
guilty slopes of humanity within, that the whole 
nature both of God and man are seen to be stirred 
in mutuality together. 

It is plainly to be seen that Christ, in his reproving 
of righteousness, has no reference to the hard favored 
scheme of legal justification commonly held. By the 
" reproving " he means, I suppose, the new apprehen- 
sion, or new sensibility to righteousness, that will be 
quickened by the revelation of it made in his person, 
and that, after he has gone up to the Father to be seen 
here no more, it will be upon the world as a power of 



BY SUCH A DOCTKINE. 255 

holy remembrance, and a new possibility of charac- 
ter, lie has not come out from God to pay up our 
penal debts, but to raise an impression for charac- 
ter. And the righteousness he brings is all for all, 
free as the clay and large as free — a grace that un- 
dertakes to fill no petty computations of bad liability, 
but simply floods and overflows the utmost receptivity 
it finds. 

Let it also be noted that Christ does not mean 
by his "reproving of judgment" the same thing 
over again which he has declared in his "reproving 
of sin." It is not his way to squander words on loose 
repetitions. I have undertaken also to show that 
his reproving of judgment is a wholly different mat- 
ter, raising initial constructions that may be carried 
farther and probably with great advantage. Last 
named by Christ in his threefold doctrine, we seem to 
see that he rates the consequence of this article high- 
est. And yet it has somehow gotten hold of theologic 
ideas but slowly. By how many is it preached, by 
how many is it distinctly conceived. Have we not 
some right to suspect, that the very thing most want- 
ed now is a due impression of the tyranny of the 
prince of this world and of the judgment-force Christ 
has set against the 'bad kingdom to bring it down. 
Is there not possibly a preaching of Christ that should 
have the same effects, in all ages and communities, 
that were wrought by the scene of the Cross. 

On the whole I can not admit that any theologian, 
or church, or council, has ever drawn a larger base of 



256 THE USES TO BE SERVED, ETC. 

doctrine, or more rich, than Christ himself has given 
us in his threefold stock of gospel outfit. Here, in 
fact, is the whole Christian System, without any pre- 
tense of system ; and the doctrine of the Spirit given 
by Christ himself. 



COMPLETION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT SECTION 

OF 

LANGE'S COMMENTARY. 

REVELATION, 

Edited with Additions by E. R. Craven, D.D., of Newark, N. J. Translation by Miss 

Evelina Moore. With an Index of Topics and of Greek Words 

covering the New Testament volumes, by J. H. Woods. 

Under the general editorship of Dr. PHILIP SCHAFF. 

I vol. 8vo, sheep, $6.50. Half calf, $7.50. Cloth, $5.00. 

With the appearance of this long-expected volume the New Testament division 
of Lange's Commentary is completed. The ten volumes in which this section of the 
work is comprised constitute a thesaurus of criticism and exegesis so thorough and 
exhaustive that it may with justice be called complete. Nothing approaching this 
Commentary in range has ever before been attempted, and the results of the investiga- 
tions of Biblical students up to the present time, and the best thoughts of all previous 
commentators, are so carefully summed up in it that it must stand for years without a 
rival; indispensable alike to the cleugyman, the educated layman, and all students of the 
.Bible who wish to arrive at the precise interpretation of the Sacred Word. 

The Volumes previously published are : 

OLD TESTAMENT.— I. GENESIS. II. JOSHUA, JUDGES, AND 
RUTH. III. FIRST AND SECOND KINGS. IV. PSALMS. 
V. PROVERBS, SONG OF SOLOMON, ECCLESIASTES. VI. 
JEREMIAH AND LAMENTATIONS. VII. MINOR 
PROPHETS. 

NEW TESTAMENT.— I. MATTHEW. II. MARK AND LUKE. 
III. JOHN. IV. ACTS. V. THE EPISTLE OF PAUL TO THE 
ROMANS. VI. CORINTHIANS. VII. GALATIANS, EPHESIANS 
PHILIPPIANS, COLOSSIANS. VIII. THESSALONIANS, TLMO- 
THY, TITUS, PHILEMON, AND HEBREWS. IX. THE EPIS- 
TLES GENERAL OF JAMES, PETER, JOHN AND JUDE. 

Each one vol. 8vo. Price per vol., in half calf, $7.50 ; in sheep, $6.50 ; in cloth, $5.00. 



NAMES AND DENOMINATIONS OF CONTRIBUlORS. 

W. G. T. SHEDD, D.D., Presbyterian. E. D. YEOMANS, D.D., Presbyterian. 

E. A. WASHBURNE, D.D., Episcopal. Rev. C C. STARBUCK, Congregational. 

A. C. KENDRICK, D.D., Baptist. J. ISIDOR MOMBERT, D.D., Episcopal 

W. H. GREEN, D.D., Presbyterian. D. W. POOR, D.D., Presbyterian 

J. F. HURST, D.D., Methodist. C. P. WING, D.D., Presbyterian. 

TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D., Dutch Reformed. GEORGE E. DAY, D.D., Congregational. 

Rev. CH. F. SHAFFER, D.D., Lutheran. Rev. P. H. STEENSTRA, Episcopal. 

R. D. HITCHCOCK, D.D., Presbyterian. A. GOSMAN,-D.D., Presbyterian. 

E. HARWOOD, D.D., Episcopal. Pres. CHAS. A. AIKEN, D.D., Presbyt'n. 

H. B. HACKETT, D.D., Baptist. M. B. RIDDLE, D.D., Dutch Reformed. 

JOHN LILLIE, D.D., Presbyterian. Prof. WM. WELLS, D.D., Metl.cdist. 

Rev. W. G. SUMNER, Episcopal. W. H. HORNBLOWER, D.D., Presbyt'n. 

Prof. CHARLES ELLIOTT, Presbyterian. Prof. GEORGE BLISS, Baptist. 

THOS. C. CONANT, D.D., Baptist. T. W. CHAMBERS, D.D., Reformed. 



Each volume of "LANGE : S COMMENTARY" is complete in itself, and can bt 
purchased separately. Sent, post-paid, to any address upon receipt of the price ($5 pet 
volume) by the publishers, 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 

654 Broadway, New York, 



THE BIBLE COMMENTARY 

{POPULARLY KNOWN IN ENGLAND AS "THE SPEAKER'S COMMENTARy.^ 

A Plain Explanatory Exposition of the Holy 
Scriptures for every Bible Reader. 

Tv be published at regular intervals, in royal octavo volumes, at the uniform WW sf 

$5. 00 per volume. 

WITH OCCASIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS. 

The great object of the BIBLE COMMENTARY is to put every general reader and stu 
dent in fell possession of whatever information may be necessary to enable him to understand 
the Holy Scriptures ; to give him, as far as possible, the same advantages as the Scholar, and 
to supply him with satisfactory answers to objections resting upon misrepresentations 01 
misinterpretations of the text To secure this end most effectually, the Comment is chiefly 
explanatory, presenting in a concise and readable form the results of learned investigation! 
carried on during the last half century. When fuller discussions of difficult passages or im 
portant subj ects are necessary, they are placed at the end of the chapter or volume. 

The text is reprinted without alteration, from the Authorized Version of 1611, with margina* 
references and renderings ; but the notes forming this Commentary will embody amended 
translations of passages proved to be incorrect in that version. 

The work will be divided into EIGHT SECTIONS, which it is expected will be comprised 
in as many volumes, and each volume will be a royal octavo Typographically, special paini 
has been taken to adapt the work to the use of older readers and students. 

N.B.— The American edition of the Bible Commentary is printed from stereotype plates, 
duplicated from those upon which the English edition is printed, and it is fully equal to 
that in every respect 

NOW READY.— FOUR VOLUMES. 
Section I.— The Pentateuch. 

GENESIS.— Right Rev. E. Harold Browne, D.D. EXODUS, Chap. I.— XIX. 
—The Editor. EXODUS, Chap. XX. to the End.— Rev. Samuel Clark, M.A. 
LEVITICUS.— Rev. Samuel Clark, M.A. NUMBERS and DEUTERONOMY.- 
Rev. T. E. Espin, B.D. 

Section II— The Historical Books. 

:f.a.:r,t i. 

JOSHUA.— Rev. T. E. Espin, B.D. JUDGES, RUTH, SAMUEL.— Right Rev. 
Lord Arthur Hervey, M.A. FIRST KINGS.— Rev. George Rawlinson, M.A. 
ZP^ZR/X" II. 

SECOND KINGS, CHRONICLES, EZRA, NEHEMIAH, ESTHER.— 
Rev. George Rawlinson. 

Section III.— The Poetical Books. 

JOB.— The Editor PSALMS.— The Editor. Very Rev. G. H. S. Johnson, Rev. 
C. I. Elliott, M.A. PROVERBS.— Rev. E. H. Plumptre, M.A. ECCLESIAS- 
TES.— Rev.W. T. Bullock, M.A. SONG OF SOLOMON.— Rev. T. Kingsbury, M.A. 

Each volume of the Speaker's Commentary is complete in itself, and is 
sold separately. Cloth, $5 ; sheep, $6.50 ; half calf, $7.50. 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 654 Broadway, N. Y. 



EDINBURGH REVIEW "The BEST History of the Roman Republic '' 

LONDON TIMES.— "BY FAR TEE BEST History of the Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Commonwealth." 



THE 

iltetonj it Momz, 

EROM THE EARLIEST TIME TO THE PERIOD OF ITS DECLINE. 

By Dr. THEODOK MOMMSEN. 

Translated, with the authors sanction and additions, by the Rev. W. P. Dickson, Regiui 
Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of Glasgow, late Classical 
Examiner in the University of St Andrews. With an In- 
troduction by Dr. Leonhard Schmitz. 

REPRINTED FROM THE REVISED LONDON EDITION. 

Four Volumes crown 8vo. Price per Volume, $2.00. 



Dr. MOMMSEN has long been known and appreciated through his researches 
into the languages, laws, and institutions of Ancient Rome and Italy, as 
the most thoroughly versed scholar now living in these departments of his- 
torical investigation. To a wonderfully exact and exhaustive knowledge of 
these subjects, he unites great powers of generalization, a vigorous, spirited, 
and exceedingly graphic style and keen analytical powers,- which give this 
history a degree of interest and a permanent value possessed by no othei 
record of the decline and fall of the Roman Commonwealth. " Dr. 
Mommsen's work," as Dr. Schmitz remarks in the introduction, "though 
the production of a man of most profound and extensive learning and 
knowledge of the world, is not as much designed for the professional 
scholar as for intelligent readers of all classes who take an interest in the his- 
tory of by-gone ages, and are inclined there to seek information that may 
guide them safely through the perplexing mazes of modern history." 

CRITICAL NOTICES. 

" A work of the very highest merit ; its learning is exact and profound ; its narrative full 
of genius and skill ; its descriptions of men are admirably vivid. We wish to place on 
record our opinion that Dr. Mommsen's is by far the best history of the Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Commonwealth." — London Times. 

" Since the days of Niebuhr, no work on Roman History Has appeared that combines so 
much to attract, instruct, and charm the reader. Its style — a rare quality in a German au- 
thor — is vigorous, spirited, and animated. Professor Mommsen's work can stand a com- 
parison with the noblest productions of modern history."- -Dr. Schmitz. 

" This is the best history of the Roman Republic, taking the work on the whole — the 
author's complete mastery of his subject, the variety of his gifts and acquirements, hij 
graphic power in the delineation of national and individual character, and the vivid interest 
which he inspires in every portion of his book. He is without an equal in his own sphere.* 
—Edinburgh Review. 

" A book of deepest interest" — Dean Trench. 



ANOTHER GREAT HISTORICAL WORK. 



W\f Ijfisteg of {JppprF, 

By Prof. Dr. ERNST CURTIUS. 

Translated by ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, MA, Fellow of St. Peter's 
College, Cambridge, Prof, of History in Owen's College, Manchester. 

To be completed in four or five vols., crown 8vo, at $2.50 per volume* 

Printed upon Tinted Paper, Uniform with Mommsen's History of Rome, and thk 
Library Edition of Froude's History of England. 

VOLS. I., II., III., & IV., NOW READY. 



Curtius' History of Greece is similar in plan and purpose to Mommsen's History of 
Rome, with which it deserves to rank in every respect as one of the great masterpieces of 
historical literature. Avoiding the minute details which overburden other similar works, 
it groups together in a very picturesque manner all the important events in the history of 
this kingdom, which has exercised such a wonderful influence upon the world's civilization. 
The narrative of Prof. Curtius' work is flowing and animated, and the generalizations, 
although bold, are philosophical and sound.' 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 



"Professor Curtius' eminent scholarship is a sufficent guarantee for the trustworthiness of 
his history, while the skill with which he groups his facts, and his effective mode of narrating 
them, cc mbine to render it no less readable than sound. Professor Curtius everywhere main- 
tains the true dignity and impartiality of history, and it is evident his sympathies are on 
the side of justice, humanity, and progress." — London Athenerum. 

"We can not express our opinion of Dr. Curtius' book better than by saying that it may 
be fitly ranked with Theodor Mommsen's great work." — London Spectator. 

"As an introduction to the study of Grecian history, no previous work is comparable to 
the present for vivacity and picturesque beauty, while in sound learning and accuracy of 
statement it is not inferior to the elaborate productions which enrich the literature of the 
age.' -1 — N. Y. Daily Tribune. 

"The History of Greece is treated l»y Dr. Curtius so broadly and freely in the spirit of 
the nineteenth century, that it becomes in his hands one of the worthiest and most instructive 
branches of study for all who desire something more than a knowledge of isolated facts for 
their education. This translation ought to become a regular part ot the accepted course 
of reading for young men at college, and for all who are in training for the free political 
life of our country." — iV. Y. Evening Post. 

This book sent post-paid, upon receipt of the price, by the Publishers, 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 

654 Broadway, New York. 



Prices and Styles of the Different Editions 

OF , 

FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



In 1 alf roan, gilt top, per set of twelve vols. i2mo $21. oi 

Elegance and cheapness are combined in a remarkable degree in this edition. It takes 
Its name from the place of Mr. Froude's residence in London, also famous as the home 
of Thomas Carlyle. 

In cloth, at the rate of $1.25 per volume. The set (12 vols.), in a neat box. $15.00 
The Same, in half calf extra 36.00 

This edition is printed from the same plates as the other editions, and en nrm : white 
paper. It is, without exception, the cheapest set of books of its class ever issued in this 
country. 

In twelve vols, crown 8vo, cloth $30.00 

The Same, in half calf extra 50.00 

The Edition is printed on laid and tinted paper, at the Riverside Press, and is in every 
respect worthy a place in the most carefully selected library. 

SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS. 

By James Anthony Froude, M.A., 

" History of England" " The English in Ireland during 
the Eighteenth Century" etc. 

POPULAR EDITION. Two vols. i2mo, cloth, $1.50 per vol. The Set $3.00 

CHELSEA EDITION. Two vols. i2mo, half roan, gilt top, $2.00 per vol- 
ume. Per Set. 4.00 

The Complete Works of James Anthony 
Froude, MA 

HISTORY OF ENGLAND AND SHORT STUDIES. 
Fourteen vols., in a neat Box. 

POPULAR EDITION $18.00 

CHELSEA EDITION 2500 

The abovt, works sent, post-paid, by m the publishers, on receipt of the 
price 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 

654 Broadway, New York, 



The Great Theological Work of the Age. 

DR. HODGFS^THEOLOGY. 
JSgslFraaHr JliljFoIogg, 

By CHARLES HODGE, D.D., LL.D., 

of Princeton Theological Seminary. 

Complete in three volumes Zvo, tinted paper. Price, vols. I. and II. , $4-50. 
Vol. HI., $5- 



In these volumes are comprised the results of the life-long labors and investigations cA 
one of the most eminent theologians of the age. The work covers the ground usually oc- 
cupied by treatises on Systematic Theology, and adopts the commonly received divisions ol 
th* subject,— THEOLOGY, Vol. I. ; ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. II. ; SOTERIOLOGY 
AND ESCHATOLOGY, Vol. III. 

The INTRODUCTION is devoted to the consideration of preliminary matters, such as 
Method, or the principles which should guide the student of Theology, and the different 
theories as to the source and standard of our knowledge of divine things, Rationalism, 
Mysticism, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Rule of Faith, and the Protestant doctrine 
on that subject. 

The department of THEOLOGY proper includes the origin of the Idea of God, the 
Being of God, the Anti-Theistic systems of Atheism, Polytheism, Materialism, and 
Pantheism ; the Nature of God, the Divine Attributes, the Doctrines of the Trinity, the 
Divinity of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit ; the Decrees of God, Creation, Providence, and 
Miracles. 

The department of ANTHROPOLOGY includes the Nature, Origin, and Antiquity of 
Man, his Primitive State and Probation ; the Fall ; the Effect of Adam's Sin upon himself 
and upon his Posterity ; the Nature of Sin ; the Different Philosophical and Theological 
Theories on that subject. 

SOTERIOLOGY includes the Plan or Purpose of God in reference to the Salvation of 
Men ; the Person and Work of the Redeemer ; his Offices as Prophet, Priest, and King ; 
the Work of the Holy Spirit in applying the redemption purchased by Christ ; Common 
and Efficacious Grace, Regeneration, Faith, Justification, Sanctification, the Law or Rule 
of Life, and the means of Grace. 

ESCHATOLOGY includes the State of the Soul after Death ; the Second Coming oi 
Christ ; the Resurrection of the Body ; the General Judgment and End of the World, and 
the Doctrine concerning Heaven and Hell. 

The plan of the author is to state and vindicate the teachings of the Bible on these 
rarious subjects, and to examine the antagonistic doctrines of different classes of Theolo- 
gians. His book, therefore, is intended to be both didactic and elenchtic. 

The various topics are discussed with that close and keen analytical and logical power, 
combined with that simplicity, lucidity, and strength of style which have already given Dr. 
Hodge a world-wide reputation as a controversialist and writer, and as an investigator ol 
the great theological problems of the day. 

Single copies sent post-paid on receipt of the price. 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 

654 Broadway, New York. 




'oo' 
























,0* ' 



* 
















.** v ^ 



■* ^ 













\ >V 



A* 



W 






-, \ 









%*$ 



,**^ 










c* v : 



> v ; - o , -> 8 * 




PC"!* N. MANCHESTER. 
t^=^im INDIANA 



mmm 









TIbrajw of congress 




0002t.740H5 c l 



